


The Kiss You Deserve

by JackofSomeTrades



Series: Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno [1]
Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Attempted Historical Accuracy, BAMF Women, F/M, First Kiss, Flashbacks, Jealousy, Mild Smut, Mission Fic, POV Alternating, Resolved Sexual Tension, gallya
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-04
Updated: 2016-02-16
Packaged: 2018-05-04 22:05:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 31,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5350130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackofSomeTrades/pseuds/JackofSomeTrades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><cite>The KGB had impeccable timing. Illya had been called away within twenty-four hours of their mission concluding in London, which meant from the moment she’d kissed him, they’d had precisely three days to figure out what the hell they meant to each other. And one of those days had been spent staking out a godforsaken warehouse in Shadwell.</cite><br/> <br/>(An expanded one-shot that sends the team across Europe after another Nazi scientist, made trickier by the fact that UNCLE is competing with the KGB, Gaby and Illya have started working out some of that tension, and there's a Mossad spy in the mix.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. London

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Gaby steps in to rescue Illya from a fight in a London club, and it forces them to work through their feelings, starting from the first time they met.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't resist trying to write Gaby and Illya's reflections on the events in TMFU, w/r/t their unresolved sexual tension. And then it got smuttier than I intended. Please feel free to leave comments / suggestions!
> 
> (Apologies in advance for any mistakes in the bits of German or Russian I use - I'm relying on Google Translate - update: with thanks to tigersharktimes for helping with the German!)
> 
> Some mild period-typical homophobic language at the start.

**Soho, London, 1964**

The band kicks off a new song and the dancefloor heaves into life, rolling Gaby along on the beat. They’re pretty good, largely due to the charisma of the skinny frontman. It’s an undemanding cover; she’s one of the many anonymous club girls, out for a good time.

The only one with any heavy lifting is Solo, who is currently replacing some keys in the inside breast pocket of a local crime lord, a small fish with sharks for friends.

She’s not expecting any trouble. Solo has already purloined the keys easily, made impressions for duplicates in the gents and handed them off to Illya. Once the keys are back in place, she has every intention of enjoying the rest of her night.

They really needed to ban smoking in these joints.

The goon’s match flares at just the wrong moment and at just the wrong angle, illuminating Solo’s hand inside his boss’ suit jacket.

“What the hell is this?”

Gaby twists closer. Solo’s face doesn’t so much as twitch but his hand must have, because he’s now rubbing the jacket material between his thumb and forefinger.

“No, no darling. This really won’t do. That body belongs in a much better suit than this.”

She can feel the shock reverberating round the group. Napoleon detaches, winks suggestively, and tries to melt away into the crowd before it wears off.

“You fucking queer!” The thug lumbers after him, and it would have gone pretty bad for the American if Illya hadn’t stepped back at precisely the right moment, the man stumbling over his leg. Gaby breathes out as Solo slips past her. Russia to the rescue.

But then, this is Illya. Who now has an extremely irate crime lord and his four henchmen to deal with, and diplomacy isn’t his strong suit. Gaby spots three club bouncers drifting over. So far, she’s impressed at the Russian’s restraint. His hands are apologetically up, he’s backing away, it could all blow over…

She’s still too far away to hear what the man says, but Illya’s body language changes instantly. His jaw clenches, the arms cross.

“Scheiße,” Gaby mutters.

Illya’s face slowly solidifies as the man continues to prod a forefinger into his chest. She’s close enough now to hear what he’s saying, close enough to see Illya’s fingers tapping out his war cry on his arms.

“Commie fucking scum, you are. Get back behind the Curtain, Russky piece of shit. Hitler had the right idea with you trolls, just a shame there were so bloody many of you.”

Illya could take out all five of them, she knows. Even though she can see one of them slipping on knuckledusters and another brute sliding a flick knife out of his pocket. The only problem, really, is if the bouncers call the police and blow their cover. Having identified an appropriate excuse, she steps forward, and promptly trips over the closest thug’s foot.

Illya’s arms catch her instantly, as she expected. Swaying slightly, she nods giddily at the other men.

“Why, hello boys,” she slurs, hoping they’ll put her accent down to the alcohol on her breath. (Only one or two, to maintain her cover.)

She swings round to look up at Illya, hands flat against his chest.

“You, sir, are really… tall.” Illya’s face softens. “Tall – but verrry pretty.”

In her peripheral vision, a bouncer nudges a thug. “Any trouble here, lads?” There’s a poised moment as Gaby maintains eye contact and pointedly presses her heel into Illya’s toes.

“Nah mate,” one of the goons says, “just some overgrown Russky and his little drunken slut.”

Illya’s hands flex instinctively and she could swear she feels him growl, rumbling through his chest and into her palms. She shakes her head slightly, but she can hear the men making further comments about her body and Illya’s fingers continue to twitch on her waist. So she does the only thing she can think of. She grabs the front of his shirt, pulls down and kisses him.

There’s a horrible moment of resistance where she thinks he’s going to push her away, but then he relents. She senses the bouncers and the thugs drifting away, still making lewd remarks. And then it’s just her and Illya, pressed together on the edge of the dancefloor.

* * *

 

It isn’t, to be honest, the best kiss. Illya had been unprepared for it and she’s angry about having to save him from his temper again. (But in truth, she is always angry. He’s just a conveniently tall lightning rod.) Her neck is craned back, their lips are squashed awkwardly together and her hands are uncomfortably trapped, twisted in his shirt. As the adrenalin fades, embarrassment sets in. She’d jumped into murky water before she was sure she wanted to swim. And there are dangerous currents in this river, and sharp rocks. Like his temper. Like their jobs. The small matter of his commitment to an ideology she absolutely rejects, his loyalty to a regime that had sanctioned so much misery for its own people, for his own family.

The first time she’d seen him, she’d been terrified. He was a pair of menacing eyes through a car window, a relentless pursuer, a giant reaching out his long arms to drag her back into East Berlin. It was a tribute to Solo’s charm and her commitment to Waverly that she’d gone back into the dress boutique to her “fiancé” not two days later.

(What kind of daughter was she – shouldn’t she have walked back in for her father’s sake? But if you lie for a living, you shouldn’t lie to yourself. Honesty should start _somewhere_.)

And if she is going to continue being honest, it hadn’t taken much to soften her up, at least a little. After years of dreary Stasi fashion, the colourful dresses Illya had chosen for her felt like individual pieces of rebellion against the East. There was an irony there.

She’d submitted gracelessly to his evaluation of her in that first expensive dress, his rough hands gently rotating her. He’d spoken to her like she was a project, an asset, but his hands had touched her with the same care that she reserved for her favourite engines.

And it was hard to hate someone who could judge your wardrobe so precisely. The nightwear (comfortable, sensible pyjamas – no frilly nighties or revealing negligées), the shoes (delicate, but not too high), even the lingerie (a perfect fit). As a final touch, she’d found her overalls tucked in the bottom of her case, freshly laundered.

She’d resisted him furiously, of course. On the flight to Rome she’d barely spoken to him, while he ignored the waves of resentment rolling across the plane.

She’d sulked all through dinner and down the Spanish Steps (although had you offered her a visit to Rome a week previously she would have walked over hot coals to get there). She’d shut down all his attempts at humour, and had taken vicious pleasure in baiting him in front of the muggers.

She hadn’t realised it had been his father’s watch, when she told him to give it up.

When Solo had bundled her across the Wall, the only thing she’d taken were her father’s tools (her real father, not the distant memory she was there to find). A little grease-stained roll tucked in her overalls. What would she have done if someone had taken them from her? If she had been told to let that person walk away?

A nice girl would have swallowed her fear and sympathised with him. A normal girl would have cried and demanded to be taken home. Being neither, she had bawled both Illya and Solo out, marched back to the hotel and started drinking steadily.

Which had done _wonders_ for her behaviour. The dancing – she wouldn’t apologise for that. But the rest of it? She’d been deliberately provoking him. Slapping him, shoving him.

Part of her wanted him to start hitting her, to be the big, bad KGB agent she’d expected, to lose control as he almost had in the ruins. Part of her wanted to crawl into his lap. And part of her had clearly wanted to rip his clothes off. But he’d let her propel him through the hotel furniture without a single complaint.

(That was another painful truth. Everyone commented on his rage, his destructive power, but he tried to cope with chess, with discipline, with silence. She coped with alcohol and recklessness. If she were two metres tall, she would be more dangerous than he.)

The vodka had left one perfectly sharp memory of her bad behaviour; the feeling of his hands gently sliding up her arms and down her body as she sank towards him, her graduated collapse towards his lips. She could still feel the warmth of his touch the next morning, still recall in detail the confusion in his eyes. He had been more afraid of the incoming kiss than he had been at the mugger’s gunpoint.

Was that still true now? Would he have preferred the hoodlum’s knuckledusters to her kiss?

The sound of the club floods back and she feels Illya pull away and gently detach her hands from his shirt.

“Come, little chop shop girl. We have work to do.”

She stares at him in disbelief. Was he going to pretend her leap into the unknown didn’t just happen? That it was part of the mission? She watches him envelope her hand in his and lead her towards the door, and like a well-worn record, she is furious with him again.

* * *

 

Illya exhales slowly, calming his heartbeat. He can feel the glare on his back from the little force of nature as he tows her out of the club. But he has to focus on the mission. Not focusing on the mission could get her killed, and he can’t risk that. Not for all the murderous looks in the world. He will wait until she’s safely back in the hotel before he can let himself smile, before his heart can hammer a victory march as he relives the memory of her lips on his.

Russians are the greatest lovers in the world – let the Italians and the French keep their flowery poetry, the British and Americans their cheesy love songs. Russians know that love is suffering and sacrifice and pain. It made sense that being in love felt a lot like being a spy.

It _was_ love now, he’d realised. He had acknowledged she was beautiful from the start, the fine profile in the driving seat of the little Wartburg 353, the night breeze blowing a strand of hair across her cheek.

He had _desired_ her from the moment she stepped out in the white and tangerine Courrèges dress at the boutique. When did that become love? (When did he become an expert?)

It had started when she’d sleepily reached for his hand, that first night in Rome. He’d regretted it the second he’d let her fingers fall off his. She had looked so gentle in her sleep, a neat inverse of the Fury he’d experienced so far. For a young mechanic from East Berlin, she’d been dealing admirably with the strains of espionage – turning to vodka was a tried and tested response.

He had expected her to despise him. She was a Communist traitor, in love with the debauchery and excesses of the West. He was her ideological nemesis. And the women of East Berlin had good reason to fear a Soviet soldier. He had seen the files on the Red Army’s behaviour in Germany at the end of World War Two. The rapes. The brutality. At the time, he’d believed it a natural consequence for the atrocities the Nazis had committed against Soviet soldiers and citizens, revenge for the sieges and the mass killings.

He had believed a lot of things, in training.

Back then, thinking had been painful. Belief was easier. So he had found solace in the system, in blind faith, in orders. In submission of self into the machine.

And now? He suspected Oleg was concerned about his ideological commitment. That was the problem with the KGB, of course. They never asked about his emotional commitment.

(When did he start thinking of his agency as _they_?)

Napoleon is waiting in the rendezvous point off the Charing Cross Road, one of the many small coffee clubs that had sprung up in the past few years. Illya hands over the key impressions.

“Nicely done, Peril. I was worried I wasn’t going to get away with that one.”

“Cowboy, I have no trouble believing you would sleep with a man. I have trouble believing you would sleep with _that_ man, but – there is no accounting for taste.”

Solo smirks. “Touché.”

“But Miss Teller deserves all credit for getting us out – I was close to causing scene.”

Gaby rolls her eyes at him. She’s still mad.

“Well that settles it,” Solo says. “There’s no point going off to East London tonight. Those boys need to forget all about that little incident before we try the break-in. I’ll go get these impressions to my guy and check in with Waverly.”

He raises an eyebrow at Gaby’s expression. “You two best head back to the hotel before she explodes on the street.”

Illya has to duck his head to hide the smile. But Solo could never leave well enough alone. “Go and work off some tension, Miss Teller. I’m sure Illya will oblige.”

Illya’s smile fades as Gaby’s head whips round to glare at Solo. Damn the man for reading the situation so well. He always manages to – what was the British phrase? – _stick his oar in_ where it wasn’t needed.

But Solo didn't need to be much of a spy to register the tension. Inexplicably, Illya's desire for Gaby seemed to be reciprocated, at least in part.

After the wrestling match, he’d spent hours reliving the feeling of her petite frame on top of him, her eyes very serious, very steady. The conflict between his personal and professional instincts had been unexpectedly sharp. It had been a relief when her eyes had slowly unfocused, her head landing harmlessly on his shoulder.

It was easier when she was angry with him, and so the next morning he’d taken a strange pleasure in goading her, in acting the arrogant fiancé with gifts for his woman.

He can see the ring on Gaby’s right hand now, flashing back and forth. She’s setting a furious pace down the street toward the hotel. She had played a game with him since he’d told her to keep it. She wore it every day, but never missed a chance to flirt with a mark.

But he’s learning. Now, for instance, he refuses to rise to the bait when the boys across the street start whistling after her and she sends them a wholly unnecessary smile.

He had initially been an easy target – all his evaluations say he wears his heart on his sleeve. (They don’t, of course. It’s another Western phrase he’s unconsciously picked up.) After the day at the racetrack, she had mentioned the attractive Italian Nazi ten times to him before Solo had arrived. He’d almost ruined one of the best photos of the radioactive evidence, and he’d vowed to do some damage to Vinciguerra’s pretty face as soon as he could. Which of course he had, somewhat terminally. He hums in nostalgic satisfaction.

“What are you doing back there?” Gaby hisses. He spreads his hands.

“Keeping eyes on you. Is not allowed?”

She tosses her head, and runs up the steps of the hotel. “Well you can _stop_ keeping an eye on me. I’m going to bed.”

Instinct tells him to let her go. He knows exactly why she’s angry. For all her bravado, she cares a lot more than she lets on. After he had returned from the Vinciguerra factory, she’d scolded him like a Moscow fishwife.

_“Why are your clothes wet?” she’d demanded, after he’d given up listening in on the Cowboy’s seduction scene._

_“Clothes are not wet. They are…damp.”_

_“Well they smell awful. Of seawater and motor oil and fish. What were you doing?”_

_“I was spying. Is my job.”_

_He’d started to peel off his wet jacket. The night had been blessedly warm, and the ride back on the scooter had helped dry him off, but his lungs had still been burning from coughing up water and the dash up to the room had done nothing to help. Suddenly short of breath, he’d sat down heavily on the couch._

_“You idiot. What did you do? Try to take on a whole factory of Vinciguerra’s guards?”_

_She’d stalked into the bathroom and thrown a towel at his head. “This may not have sunk in to your thick head, but you’re not superhuman. I’m going to run you a bath.”_

Yes, he’d loved her from that moment on. But he was new to the experience, or perhaps just rusted over. He’s having to improvise.

* * *

 

Gaby slams her hotel room door. He was _laughing_ at her. How dare he?

She grinds her teeth a little, kicks off her shoes, and pours a generous slug of vodka. Leans against the sideboard, scowls at the door. It remains stubbornly silent.

She’d broken their ordinary pattern. They’d established the rules of their game and played it skilfully for months, through Istanbul, then Athens and Madrid.

She would be prickly and combative and he would be quiet and stubborn, slowly softening her up with a touch, a look, until they were at the brink of no return. Then she would create a diversion, run away or lash out. Give him the silent treatment and they’d start the dance again.

The bellboy had stopped her from kissing him goodbye in Rome, and any kiss after that wasn’t going to be a simple goodbye. Not yet, anyway. Waverly had told her in no uncertain terms not to cause difficulties so early in UNCLE’s genesis.

_“It looks like we’ll be the neutral ground for Russia and the USA for a while longer, Miss Teller. I can count on you to keep things neutral for now, can’t I?”_

_“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Waverly.”_

_He’d taken her hand, charmingly. “It’s a marvellous little keepsake you’ve picked up, isn’t it? I can see why you’re so attached. Best not to wave it around too publicly though, hmm? Such an unusual ring – it might attract the wrong sort of attention.”_

For Waverly, that was as plain speaking as it got. Damn British aristocracy.

So she’d done her best. Not that she’d ever been any good at pushing Illya away. She’d tried, that last morning in Rome – aiming to hurt him a little before she betrayed him completely. Deliberately left the tracker switched off and brazenly asked Solo to check up her skirt.

But it had backfired. Solo was too damn observant for his own good. Instead, she’d ended up centimetres from Illya’s lips _again_ , drawn in by his stupid blue eyes, his stupid deep voice and his stupid gentle hands caressing her leg. Making it even harder for her to throw him to the wolves.

The door is still silent. She drains her glass and throws a sofa cushion at it, for good measure.

Damn that man. He was as obstinate as she was. She had assumed he would wash his hands of her after her little performance for Uncle Rudi and Alexander, and would have washed them again when Waverly outed her as a British spy.

But no. She closes her eyes, remembers him dragging her into his lap on the Italian hillside, his hands checking her body for injuries, insisting she was treated first by the medics. His hand had never left her until Waverly arrived.

Well, so much for neutral. She’s put the car into gear now.

The problem is, she no longer thinks of him as KGB, knows he would never drag her back behind the Wall. Now it is _him_ disappearing back to Russia that she fears, Illya getting sucked back into the Soviet web and leaving her alone. Free, but very cold.

She is so focused on the door that when the knock finally comes, for a moment she thinks she imagined it. She pours another drink and makes herself count to ten.

“It’s open!”

He gives her an exasperated look as he enters. “How many times I have to tell you? Always check first who it is. And never leave your door unlocked. I could have been anyone.”

“Relax, I knew it was you – no-one else’s knock comes from near the goddamn ceiling, and I can smell your cheap Soviet aftershave from here.”

He ignores her, calmly locking the door behind him. She notices that she’s gripping her glass so hard that her fingers are aching.

He crosses the sitting room and puts one hand deliberately down on the sideboard next to her, pinning her in place, then prises the glass out of her hands and drains it.

“You’re driving me to drink on the job, little one.”

His presence seems to be repelling all the oxygen in the room and she's suddenly lightheaded. He carefully sets the tumbler down, and then she’s being lifted. Her legs automatically catch around his hips, her arms round his neck. He settles her in place, both hands supporting her legs, completely at ease. Her skirt has fallen back during the lift and his fingers trace electric circles on her bare skin.

All her brain cells zero in on the sensation as he walks her across to the wall.

“Breathe, Gaby.”

She opens her mouth to protest, but he starts kissing his way up from her collarbone and both languages completely abandon her. It’s only when he reaches her jawline and starts again from the base of her other clavicle that frustration brings words back into her head.

“Illya, was machst du?”

He smiles, and brings his head up to face hers.

“Kissing you like you deserve, little chop shop girl.”

Then his mouth closes on hers and she’s in deep trouble. The kiss is sure and strong, bringing the blood pounding to her ears, increasing slowly but firmly in intensity as one hand trails fire and ice up the back of her thigh, stopping only at the lace of her underwear. How the hell is he so calm while he’s pulling her to pieces?

He breaks contact and she scrabbles to focus. His smile is smugly self-satisfied, but his breathing is unsteady and she realises how hard he’s working to stay in control.

She senses the opportunity for revenge. Her hands twist into his hair and she tugs his chin up. She tightens her legs around his waist, pulls him in closer, and very deliberately bites his bottom lip.

Illya’s eyes cross and he staggers slightly, one hand releasing her to brace himself against the wall. She releases his lip and starts nibbling down his neck, making him groan softly in Russian.

She breaks off when she runs out of neck, and he seizes the opening to push off the wall. His free hand untucks her legs and stands her on the couch. Then he’s kneeling on the floor in front of her, her hands resting on his shoulders.

“So. Now we shall see how steady _you_ are.”

His hands start sliding up her legs, under her skirt. She smiles.

“What are you doing down there, Illya?”

“Getting lost.”

She half hopes he’s going to tear her underwear to pieces, but given his expression after the time she got motor oil on one of her dresses, she doesn’t suggest it.

Instead, the satin and lace falls to the floor, but his hands stay on her hips and she suddenly figures out his plan of attack. Her heartbeat appears to be focused entirely in one very specific part of her body, so when his blue eyes disappear under her skirt, she has to concentrate very hard to stay upright.

She holds out for about two minutes before her legs start to shake.

“Illya,” she breathes. “I can’t….”

She feels his grip change, and in one fluid movement, she’s half lying on the edge of the couch, her legs over his shoulders.

She has no idea how long she lasts. Her entire universe dwindles to a single dot of intense, white light. The dot is somehow falling in on itself, becoming smaller, brighter, hotter until it finally explodes, showering the inside of her eyelids with red and black stars.

Her other senses drift back into the room, which seems quieter than she remembers.

“What happened to the noise? I thought – I thought I heard a noise.”

Illya is laughing at her openly this time. “There was. You stopped making it.”

“Oh.”

She feels deliciously languid, limbs full of warm treacle. Illya transfers her gently to the bed.

“Get some rest, little chop shop girl.”

He kisses her gently on the forehead, and turns to go.

“Oh no. No, no, no. Where are you going?”

He has the decency to look embarrassed. She hooks her foot round one of his legs, and tugs him closer. “Du hast zu viel an."

He raises an eyebrow, and she idly wonders if he’s picked that up from Napoleon. Now she’s caught her breath, the idea of getting him out of his shirt and slacks seems increasingly attractive.

(Three missions, and the most she’d ever managed was seeing him climb out of the Bosphorus, fully clothed and soaking wet.)

He appears a bit reluctant, so she kicks the back of his knees until he sits on the bed and then straddles him. Her fingers flex automatically at the combination of his trouser fabric and her stimulated skin. It has a similar effect on Illya, based on the way his eyes had unfocused as she settled into place, and the very _satisfying_ way he’s pressing into her now.

“Gaby…” She ignores him and focuses on unbuttoning the front of his shirt.

“Please, малютка. You may not like….”

“Shut up, Kuryakin. What do you think I’m going to do? Run away at the sight of a few scars? Now, you’re killing my mood. Stop it.”

She slides the shirt off his shoulders, and runs her hands over his back.

“Christ, Illya.” He tenses. “This is a really bad tan line. I know they don’t get much sun in Moscow, but we’ve been in Southern Europe for six months. You need to take a leaf out of Solo’s book.”

Her eyes meet his, and she thinks she can spot the glimmer of a smile.

“I am _never_ taking any leaves from Cowboy’s beauty regime.”

She rolls her eyes. “ _Fine_. But for my sake, next time we’re somewhere hot can you sit out on the balcony for a bit please? I feel like I’m sleeping with a muscular ghost.”

Now he’s definitely smiling. She slides off the bed, tugs him upright and starts unbuckling his belt. She feels his breath catch as she hooks a finger into the waistband of his trousers and pauses.

This is it. This is the point where neutral disappears completely.

His hands slide softly down her arms. “Gaby…” He’s staring down at her, eyes burning. “You don’t have to do this.”

She slowly turns her back to him, and smiles.

“Fine – unzip yourself if you like. Then can you help me out of this dress please?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Illya, was machst du?" - "Illya, what are you doing?"
> 
> "Du hast zu viel an." - "You are wearing too many clothes." 
> 
> "малютка" - "little one"
> 
> P.S. Yes, the band in the Soho club are meant to be The Rolling Stones.


	2. Bayreuth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Extension of the original stand-alone prior chapter, now with an actual plot (of sorts).
> 
> Illya gets called back to Russia, but it looks like Gaby and Solo's new mission is going to bring them into conflict with the KGB's best - and his new partner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I never expected to write more, but I've come up with a plot that is only relatively ridiculous, and tries to stay vaguely in line with historical political tensions. It's probably got another three chapters in it - will try to update relatively regularly.
> 
> I hope you can forgive the addition of an OFC – I felt her character helps to develop the plot and the relationships between Gaby, Illya and Napoleon, but please let me know if you think it’s all gone pear-shaped. (Plus any other comments / corrections for glaring errors welcomed!)

**Bayreuth, Bavaria, 1964**

The agent takes cover by a fallen tree to check her compass. It’s still a quarter-mile to the pick-up point, and she can sense the proximity of her pursuers.

The rain is coming down harder now, making it difficult to hear anything out of the ordinary. She can’t wait much longer. She shifts her balance, then freezes, as she hears the unmistakeable sound of a motorcycle back towards the house. One of them must have located it in the garage. It’ll struggle to get to her through the trees, but it could compromise the pick-up.

She swears quietly under her breath. She should have known that other agencies would have picked up the same intelligence – or hers has leaked it deliberately. (So pleased to be working for a team player.) She sees the glimmer of headlights behind her, through the trees. Now or never.

She makes a break for it, abandoning any pretence of stealth, crashing through the undergrowth. She can see the estate wall up ahead when she’s tackled. Her attacker catches her at waist height and the two of them tumble through the mud and out the edge of the tree line. Right on cue, she hears the whomp-whomp of the pick-up helicopter, and the two of them are suddenly bathed in searchlights. They’re not expecting her to have company, so there’s little her team can do apart from slowly land in the open field outside the estate.

Her attacker smacks her across the face, and it jolts her training into action. She spins out of the follow-up blow and twists into a kick, flooring her opponent.

The light of the landing ‘copter illuminates a brown-haired girl about her age and build. It’s clear from the power in that initial punch that she’s had some training, but from the way she landed, she’s not an expert fighter. The agent draws her gun. She’s under orders not to use lethal force, but she hasn’t much time.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” she tells her pursuer. “Toss the gun and put your hands up.”

The girl is furious, you can see it in her eyes, but she tosses her gun over. She tucks it away, then aims another strong kick at the solar plexus. Her rival goes down again, gasping for air.

The helicopter touches down outside the grounds, and the agent sprints towards the wall. It’s well over her head height, but that’s why she’s been trained since childhood. She spots the best footholds on her approach and it’s the work of moments to scale the old brick.

At the top she looks back and her opponent goes up in her estimation once more. She knows that kick should have broken a rib, but the girl is up and running, already closing the gap to the wall. The agent smiles involuntarily and drops out of sight.

She has the comfort of her partner’s covering gun on the approach to the helicopter. She jogs the last few steps and her partner reaches out to pull her in. She grabs his hand, and watches his expression change. She looks back, and sees the girl’s head above the wall.

“Go, go,” she shouts. “There’s another with her on a motorcycle. He’ll be through the gate any moment.”

Her partner nods, and shouts in Russian at the pilot. Moments later, they’re in the air, and she can relax. She looks across at him.

“Kuryakin, you look like you’ve seen a ghost. Who’s the girl?”

* * *

Napoleon cuts the engine at the estate gate – the helicopter is out of reach now. Gaby radios in, and he waits until she comes into view from around the curve of the wall. She seems fine, although it looks like it’s hurting her to breathe. Her expression is bleak, and he knows her well enough to see there’s something amiss other than some physical pain.

“Solo – the man in the helicopter. The guy who picked up the thief. It – it was Illya.”

His face goes blank. Peril’s been gone for two months now, summoned peremptorily back to Moscow, a dog responding to its master. (An unfair simile, he knows, but he’s allowed to be harsh in the privacy of his own head.) He’s been surprised at how much he’s missed the man, although even his cynical soul will allow that when someone saves your life a couple dozen times, it’s hard to be entirely ambivalent.

Gaby’s not been the same since he left. She doesn’t have his detachment. How could she? It’s taken him decades of loving and losing to perfect it.

What the hell is Peril doing at an ex-Nazi HQ in West Germany? Particularly in the company of some sort of cat burglar. A burglar who just made off with the very intelligence that he was there to collect. He unconsciously wrinkled his nose. It was... _rude._

They’d slipped out of the little village just after dark, cutting across fields on foot to avoid raising suspicion. The Steinhaus was empty for the weekend, apart from a skeleton staff whose quarters were away from the target zone, and a rather elderly caretaker with a clockwork routine. After the war, the residence had been picked clean by the authorities, or so they thought. The current owners had put their trust in some really quite impressive locks to keep out your average thief and the more _misguided_ local enthusiasts of the prior regime. Naturally, it had seemed an easy target.

And as expected, their progress had been serene. Nothing had seemed amiss, not a single lock broken or picked – at least until he’d arrived. They’d located the required room, having picked up a couple of useful trinkets to make any evidence of a break-in plausible. One final lock, the door swinging open – and there was a figure in black, framed against the open window. She’d come up what, from his memories of the blueprints, appeared to be a sheer wall.

He replayed the scene, his almost perfect recall supplying everything except the smell of the room. She’d been surprised to see them too, her body language betrayed her. But she’d seen their weaponry was holstered, and had been out the window within perhaps a second. Gaby had rushed to the window, while he’d gone to check the hiding place in the chimney flue.

Having found it empty, he had joined Gaby at the window. The agent had managed to land on a balcony which by all sane standards should have been unreachable. Unless, he considers now, she had managed to use a small water outflow pipe as an interim measure. Christ, what was it with the Russians and finding these freaks of nature?

Gaby had fired off three shots already, and if she hadn’t hit anything, he had no chance of taking down the rapidly disappearing figure. It was mildly galling how quickly she’d picked up marksmanship.

Instead, they’d sprinted down two staircases, broken into the library, and Gaby had squeezed out a small fan window near a useful drainpipe.

“Don’t engage for God’s sake,” he’d said. “Just track her and keep in touch. I’ll come get you.”

She’d disappeared off into the gently falling rain, and he’d gone to hotwire the bike.

As he finishes his mental recap of the night, he feels a stab of an unfamiliar emotion. Guilt is superseding irritation. He had been too slow. Gaby’s only mildly hurt, but she could easily have been killed before he’d arrived.

“I told you not to take her on,” he says, and he can hear what a poor excuse it is.

“You should have been faster,” she snaps. “Next time we do this, _I’m_ going to find the bike and _you_ can get kicked in the ribs by the mystery agent.”

* * *

**Bonn**

“Good news chaps,” Waverly announced, two days later. “We’ve identified your little cat burglar.”

He tosses a slim dossier on the table. Gaby forces herself to wait until Solo has flipped through it then opens it herself. She finds herself looking at a grainy sepia picture of a small, dark girl. It could almost be a picture of herself except for the eyes, which she knows in real life are cold and blue.

The other photos show the same girl in military fatigues in a desert, in a platoon of other girls, and then a series of photos of a small figure dressed as a gymnast, festooned with medals.

“Her name is Yael Dayan,” Waverly continues. “She’s an Israeli citizen – her parents emigrated from Russia in the 1930s. As you can see, she’s quite an accomplished gymnast. We believe she was recruited by Mossad at university.”

“Stop me if I’m wrong,” drawled Napoleon, “but what is a Mossad agent doing working with the KGB? Shouldn’t she be working with my lot?”

“Well, yes, Solo – we were all a little surprised to see the Israelis working with the Russians. Of course, after the fallout from the Eichmann extraction, Mossad are having to be a little more covert in their operations to locate escaped Nazis. But that doesn’t mean they’re not pressing ahead by using other agencies to further their aims. From what we can gather, Mossad has been drip-feeding the Russians intelligence about hidden Nazi gold and secret science experiments to pique their interest. In return, the USSR is vaguely suggesting they could lift the restrictions on Russian Jews emigrating to Israel. Clearly Mossad have stepped things up a notch by lending the KGB one of their agents.”

“The CIA can’t be very pleased.”

“I rather think that Mossad are hoping they don’t know, Solo. Are you planning to drop your boss a note on the matter?”

Gaby lets them bicker in the background while she studies the Israeli’s file. There’s little more of substance. She’s begun to appreciate how skilful Waverly is at gathering intelligence he really has no business knowing, but it’s still frustrating there’s not more detail. Female agents aren’t uncommon, but in her experience they’re normally restricted to the roles of seductress or secretary.

She wishes the meeting would break up. Her ribs still hurt and her head is buzzing. She just wants an hour to empty all her thoughts out, to spill them across a workshop bench, fitting them back together so that her brain spins and whirrs rather than stutters and stalls.

Something in Solo’s tone changes, and she tries to focus on the conversation.

“So what the hell was the point of putting Gaby in harm’s way if you have the damn info anyway?”

“I _don’t_ have all the intelligence, Solo. I merely have a direction to point you in.”

“What about Illya?” They turn to look at her, and she realises she’s spoken out loud.

Waverly’s expression remains resolutely cheerful.

“Kuryakin’s presence was…unexpected.”

Solo snorts. “Y’know, Waverly, I can’t figure out if you’re getting more information from Peril or Mossad at this point. I vote Gaby and I head off to Cannes for a couple of weeks – you seem to be doing beautifully without us.”

Gaby mentally shakes herself – she had assumed Illya would be out of contact with UNCLE entirely while he was with the KGB. He’d certainly given her that impression when he left, but then he hadn’t been particularly forthcoming, and she doesn’t remember it particularly clearly due to the subsequent vodka consumption.

So much for the honeymoon period. The KGB had impeccable timing. He’d been called away within twenty-four hours of their mission concluding in London, which meant from the moment she’d kissed him, they’d had precisely three days to figure out what the hell they meant to each other. And one of those days had been spent staking out a godforsaken warehouse in Shadwell.

She’s clenching her hands under the desk. _Not now, Gaby._ She wrenches her brain back into the present. Waverly and Solo are huddled round some brochures and blueprints, and Napoleon’s chewing his lip, the way he does when he’s coming up with a plan.

“If that’s what we’re being told, then he’s got to be our man. The CIA wouldn’t invest this much time into a cover for a Nazi unless he was selling them something big.”

“And this is obviously the best opportunity to target him.”

“Agreed, but it doesn’t give us much time…”

Gaby rolls her eyes. Her boss has a wonderfully sly way of getting Solo to talk himself into a mission. Napoleon doesn’t talk much about his army background or his CIA handlers, but it’s clear that he dislikes being given orders. A vague memory floats back in from the safe house in West Berlin, the smell of Solo’s cooking and a croaky smoker’s voice echoing down the dingy corridor:

_“We don’t pay you enough to put truffles in your risotto, Solo. Don’t ever make the calamitous error of mistaking my deliberate short-sightedness for blindness. Now you’ll report for duty tomorrow morning, 9 am sharp. And with a better attitude.”_

They treated him like a criminal; Waverly treats him like a colleague. He dangles problems in front of Solo, daring him to find the solutions. He practically _encourages_ the American’s light-fingered activities, and if he ever gets close to having to give an order, it’s dressed up in so many pleases and thank-yous that you end up benevolently agreeing to everything he wants. It’s not that she thinks Solo is oblivious to Waverly’s methods, but he appears to respect another master of manipulative charm.

She sighs. Between the Englishman and the American, her own direct communication style seems hard, blunt. It’s another reason that she misses Illya – without him, she’s drowning in Western platitudes and allusions.

“Miss Teller, are you with us?”

She waves a hand airily. “Solo can fill in the fine detail on our way to…Vienna?” she hazards.

“ _Paris_ , Miss Teller.” Waverly gives a meaningful look at Solo as he leaves. Napoleon raises an inscrutable eyebrow.

“Gaby...”

“Do not start with me, Solo. I’m _fine_. So the plan is to follow Illya and his new partner to Paris, to get to this scientist who used to work at that Nazi research facility before they do?”

“In a nutshell.”

“And why is this ex-Nazi so important?”

“Waverly thinks he’s planning to defect to THRUSH. He could lead us to some of the head honchos.”

“Which is why Mossad is helping us, I see - I imagine they don't like the idea of a secret criminal organisation linked to the Third Reich any more than we do. But they’re also helping the Russians for reasons of eggs, baskets and so forth.”

“You _were_ listening!” Solo can be unbelievably patronising at times.

“I don’t see why the KGB is so interested.”

“They’re interested in anything the Americans have – and whatever Illya and that damn Israeli gecko recovered must have kept their interest.”

* * *

**Moscow**

Yael comes into his office, flipping through a KGB file.

“This explains a lot,” she says in her accented Russian, dropping it on the table in front of him. “I just thought you didn’t like Jews.”

He gives her a warning look. He’s pretty sure this office is bugged, so he’s become even more monosyllabic than usual.

“We look just enough alike for the differences to be jarring. A frustrating combination.” She waits to see if there will be a reaction, then shrugs. “So. Paris?”

He likes _that_ about her, at least. She doesn’t dwell on things.

“We think Fischer is working in the Institut Nationale de Médecine under the name Müller. The Americans appear to have struck a deal with him, possibly to benefit from any advances he makes. They’re holding a fundraiser in two weeks. We’ll make contact there.”

“Why hasn’t he emigrated to the US, if he’s working with the Americans?”

“We’re not sure. We hope it’s because he’s not committed to the Western cause. They’re hoping we can convince him to come East.”

Her face flickers slightly. He can guess what she’s thinking. The research they found stuffed up the chimney is tantalising, but the methods Fischer was using were beyond barbaric. He guesses her agency’s preference is to kill the man, as painfully as possible, and he’d concede they have a point. But she’s on a leash. KGB sources suggest there are as many as 100,000 Soviet Jews seeking to emigrate to Israel, and the Kremlin had granted only a handful of visas in the past few years.

“Understood. Contact me when you have details of my cover.”

She goes out, leaving the file on the table. He can’t resist. He pulls it across and flips it open. He knows there’s no camera surveillance in his office – not yet – and so he allows his expression to soften as he looks at her face.

He’s checked and rechecked this file multiple times in the past two months. Twice as much as he’s checked the files on Solo and Waverly. It’s partly to see her face again, especially that one photo of them in Istanbul, where she’s laughing at him across a table at a street café. But it’s partly to check that they haven’t captured anything damaging on her, or worse, details of any injuries. (Or lovers – his traitorous brain supplies.)

His contact with Waverly is minimal in the extreme, and it doesn’t include gossip about Gaby’s state of mind. He knew it would be like this, when he left, but clearly his subconscious isn’t getting the message. He wakes most nights in a cold sweat from dreams where he’s hammering at a door while she screams for his help on the other side, or cradles her cold body in his arms because he was too far away to reach her. He is used to these sorts of dreams, of course, but they have traditionally featured his mother. Is this progress?

He’s missing Cowboy and Waverly too, which has been more of a surprise. He has grown accustomed to their easy charm, their humour, their irreverence. He’d returned to Russia and found it harsher than he remembered. He’s gone soft – and the wrecked chair in his apartment proves it. Cowboy had been shot in the arm, according to intelligence, about a month after he had returned to Moscow. Illya had taken it as a personal affront. If anyone is going to put a bullet in that smug муда́к, it’s going to be him.

And though he will deny it to his dying day, the Englishman and the American are extraordinarily good at their jobs. He’s never met someone with more creativity than Cowboy, and Waverly could get a corpse to disclose trade secrets. Comparatively, his compatriots in Moscow are a mixed bag. There are some excellent minds here, and some effectively amoral operatives, but they’re surrounded by journeyman sycophants more concerned with managing their political careers to take any real responsibility. It’s no consolation that Solo’s stories suggest the CIA are little better. Ideology is no match for personal arse-covering.

And then there’s Yael. He’d been saddled with her a month ago. She’d walked through the door and his heart had momentarily stopped. He’s never forgiven her for not being Gaby, but he will allow that she is skilled, ruthless, professional. His superiors had patronised her, made comments behind her back about her race, her sex. But she could best almost any of them in a fight, and only Cowboy could infiltrate a building faster. He wonders, occasionally, how close a call it would be if he took her on.

She reminds him of Gaby in more than just looks. She is, he senses, quite stubborn, and under the clinical exterior is some of the same fire that drives his little mechanic. Working with the Israeli has made him think hard about his protective impulse towards Gaby. In Rome, she’d been scared, untried, untested. But it’s a year on – does she still need him to protect her? Gaby is an excellent agent, almost unflappable in the field, able to think quickly on her feet, and angry enough to be lethal. But he can’t bear the idea of her getting hurt, and a true agent needs to be in harm’s way.

He deliberately doesn’t think about Yael tangling with Gaby in Bavaria. Just contemplating it brings on the red mist, and that would jeopardise all of the work he’s doing. Instead, he forces his mind back to that night in London. The room has taken on a golden tinge in his memory, and his mind runs through now-familiar grooves.

_“Where did you learn to do all that?” she asks, fingers idly trailing across the scarred Braille of his torso._

_He feigns ignorance. “Do what?”_

_She punches him gently in the side. “You know exactly what I mean. I thought Solo was meant to be the experienced womaniser in the team.”_

_“KGB training is very thorough. And Russians are better lovers than Americans – is the long, dark winters. Nothing else to do."_

_She rolls her eyes and he drops his smug act._

_“There were women on KGB training base. Secretaries, some trainee agents, wives.” He shrugs._

_“I don’t see you as the flirtatious type, Illya. What aren’t you telling me?”_

_He pauses. “Final year of training, new secretary arrives in my section. Her father also sent to gulag, and others were…not kind. She was very brave, never complained. One day, I see her supervisor with her. She does not want his advances, I can see. So I stop him. Luckily my record is good, and I break his arm cleanly, so I only get mild punishment. Afterwards, she finds me, thanks me. We make friends. Eventually more than friends.”_

_“Did you love her?”_

_He shrugs. “I was…not capable of love, then.”_

_“What happened?”_

_He looks away, readying himself for the fallout. “She lost interest, after a while. Perhaps I frightened her – I was not stable. I became jealous, would break furniture. I put bug in her typewriter, tracker in her coat.”_

_“Scheiße.”_

_He winces, but continues. “She broke it off, and I destroyed one of the bathrooms. But I never touch her. And I stop spying on her. She’s married now – nice man. Works in resourcing.” He realises how that sounds. “I only know because Oleg told me last year.”_

_He risks a look at her face. She looks very grave._

_“Illya –“_

_He sighs, and begins to slide out of the bed._

_“I’m sorry, Gaby. You deserve better. Someone less volatile.”_

_“Illya, wait. I mean... it’s not good. But you know that. And I’m no saint. And...and I trust you. I know that you won’t hurt me. Although – you need to tell me about every bug and tracker you use on me, in future.”_

_She pauses for a moment and colours slightly. “On that note – have you bugged this room?”_

_He tries very hard not to smile. “Is my job to ensure you are safe, малютка.”_

_“And do you listen to ensure I’m safe?” He nods. She clears her throat, and looks fixedly at the opposite wall._

_“Were... were you listening last night?”_

_“Only for short while.”_

_“What did you hear, Illya?”_

_He smiles at her discomfiture. For a moment last night his heart had stopped – he’d thought she had someone in there. Perhaps even Cowboy. Then he’d heard her breathe his name and he’d realised what she was doing. He knew he should have turned it off, but he’d listened greedily until the end then taken the coldest shower he could get._

_“ILLYA?!”_

_“I promise – you will be personally shown all bugs and trackers in your room in future.”_

_She hits him with the pillow._

_“I am sorry, Радость моя. I did not mean to eavesdrop. I thought you were asleep – I just meant to check you were ok. But it was wonderful to hear you. I promise myself I would be responsible for causing you to make those noises one day.”_

_He strokes her cheek, and lets his hand wander down her body. She’s still looking away, but he feels her lean into his touch. He could do this forever. It’s the most peaceful he’s felt in years, the rage draining away to levels that even his most dedicated meditations haven’t achieved. His fingers circle her navel and she bites her bottom lip._

_“I would love to hear them again now, if you’d let me,” he murmurs, and she finally looks round, those beautiful eyes already slightly unfocused._

_“You are **not** forgiven,” she says, but there’s a glorious hitch in her voice as his fingers slide between her legs, and her head sags back against the headboard._

He snaps back to the present as he hears himself make an entirely inappropriate noise for the office. He flexes his right hand into a fist a few times, exhaling. He’s been taking lots of cold showers in the past two months.

* * *

**Bonn**

Waverly has thoughtfully arranged for her to help out in a local garage for a few days. They make the usual comments, but she’s long used to tuning them out. She lets them pass her basic tyre changes and service checks, waiting for a good project.

On the second afternoon, the lads tow in a beautiful Mercedes 300 SL, the owner clucking along behind. Five minutes of flirting and thirty seconds of demonstrable knowledge later, she’s finally left alone with it. Her brain clicks into gear for the first time in weeks, and she settles to work.

Why has she been so out of sorts for the past week? There’s an obvious answer – she’s missing Illya. But she’s been missing him ever since he left. The first two weeks were tough, but the longing and the worry had subsided into a dull, permanent ache since then.

She was used to people leaving. Her mother, her father, her foster father. Illya was just one more. She’d been able to convince herself that she just missed the sex; that her heart was untouched. She’d funnelled the pain into work, as usual. Ballet had been good for that, when she was young. Cars were better – the adrenalin rush of the driving balanced with the calm, methodical certainty of the engineering.

But since Bayreuth, she’s been unable to settle. She wipes away some grease, trying to figure out what is causing this beautiful car to convulse every time it hits third gear. She gives a cog a particularly hard wrench, and the mechanism moves aside, revealing the problem. She’s jealous. Damn.

It’s not like she thought Illya was sat behind a desk in Moscow, but she realises that she had assumed he would be working alone. Hadn’t he always said that, when grumbling at Solo’s methods? It’s hardly surprising she’s discomfited – what woman would relish _oh lord, not her boyfriend_. _Beau? Partner? Ugh –_ her _someone_ working closely with a lithe, attractive woman.

The Israeli’s blue eyes didn’t help. Growing up as a dark, brown-eyed girl in a country where the blonde and blue-eyed were idealized meant she was overly-sensitive. She shakes her head – to be jealous of a Jewish girl’s blue eyes because of her own, lonely childhood in the Third Reich? She’s hit a new low.

But it’s more than just looks – she’s jealous of Yael’s expertise. Yael didn’t need to be taken care of, she was sent on missions while Illya was content to hang around in a helicopter. He trusted her to get the job done, so he’s clearly impressed by her. She can see them discussing the best disarming techniques together, sparring together, ending up rolling around on the mat together… She yanks a bolt too hard and is rewarded by a spray of brake fluid in her face.

Waverly had arranged for her to get some combat training after Rome, and Solo had happily given her some nasty little tricks to get the upper hand in a fight. It would have been inviting temptation to start trying to wrestle with Illya again, but now she wished she had, so that he’d think of her if he was sparring with the gymnast. He had come and watched her practise once, and had critiqued her relentlessly – she’d been furious at him for days, the man was incapable of giving a compliment. But she knew how far she was from being truly skilled.

And that’s it, she realises, as she fits a new part and starts tightening everything up. She’s jealous because Illya’s treating Yael as a partner, as an equal. Waverly and Solo are just as bad – she’s the novice, the trainee, the _girl_.

She doesn’t honestly think that Illya has forgotten her in the space of two months. The expression on his face as he said goodbye was – well she reckons the hard Russian was close to tears. But he sees her as fragile, in need of protection. And she knows she can be more than that.

She closes the bonnet of the car, satisfied.

“Ist mein Auto reparieren?” the owner asks, pulling her back to the here and now.

“Ja.”

She looks down contemplatively at the wrench in her hand, hands it to one of the gobsmacked mechanics and heads out of the garage. _Enough daydreaming, Teller. Time to work._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realised it wasn't explicitly mentioned in the movie - I am assuming the criminal organisation the Vinciguerras are involved with is THRUSH, the foe of UNCLE in the TV series. The same organisation plays the same role in this fic.
> 
> The Steinhaus in the small village of Waischenfeld became the HQ of the Ahnenerbe in 1943. The Ahnenerbe was the organisation set up by Himmler to investigate the racial heritage of the Germanic people, but it quickly devolved into a focus on occultism and therefore has been a useful plot point for scriptwriters for the rest of the 20th Century (and beyond). It did sponsor a number of horrific medical experiments on prisoners, however, led by Wolfram Sievers. I have no idea if the Steinhaus used looks anything like the stately home I’ve described here (almost certainly not!)
> 
> I felt the inclusion of a Mossad agent keeps to the TMFU theme of throwing a range of 1960s cultures and political agendas together in unlikely but theoretically possible ways. I'm not an expert in 1960s history or politics though, so period accuracy is only going to go so far.
> 
> The 1960-62 extraction, trial and execution of Eichmann by Mossad was controversial. Mossad agents seized Eichmann near his home in Buenos Aires. Argentina then complained to the UN Security Council that the capture was a violation of their sovereign rights. Mossad planned a subsequent mission to capture Josef Mengele, but this was abandoned due to international pressure.
> 
> During the 1960s, there was a swell of requests to leave the Soviet Union from Jews who wanted to emigrate to Israel. These were almost always denied. This is the origin of the term “refusenik”.
> 
> There is no such place as the Institut Nationale de Médecine. I couldn’t bear to associate a real French institution with harbouring a Nazi. However, there is precedent, as many members of the Ahnenerbe returned to academia after the war under false names.
> 
> Радость моя = my joy.
> 
> I know nothing about cars, so have tried to keep Gaby’s repair work as vague as possible. To all knowledgeable car enthusiasts and mechanics who may read this – I’m sorry! At least the model of car should be period-appropriate.


	3. Paris

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gaby and Napoleon head to Paris to steal back the initiative from Illya and Yael. Which team will get to the scientist first?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it took me ages to post this. The holidays were pretty full-on and this chapter was really tricky to write - a typical case of The Difficult Third Album.
> 
> I've already started Chapter 4 though so hopefully I'll be able to update a bit more frequently, if anyone still has the patience to stick with it!

**Paris, 1964**

He sees Illya immediately – at almost two metres tall, he’s hardly inconspicuous. What surprises him is that the Russian is on the dancefloor, performing a perfectly passable waltz with the Israeli agent. The sharp intake of breath next to him indicates Gaby has also clocked it.

“Livia, darling wife of mine, you’re grinding your teeth. Shall we try and locate the man we’re here to find? I don’t think Professor Müller dances.”

“Well you never know, my love. It appears Paris can make _anyone_ a dancer.”

“Let’s do a tour of the room, and then we can show them up. Would that make you happier?”

Gaby smiles, evilly.

He enjoys working with her – she’s excellent company – but it’s an unusual relationship for him. His default settings are superficial charm and sex. Women are usually kept at arm’s length, even when they are physically very much intertwined.

His formative experiences didn’t exactly provide him with a strong foundation for mature, complex relationships with women; an overbearing, religious mother, an absent father, joining the army as soon as he could pass for eighteen then travelling through a Europe that barely resembled the developed world. Whorehouses had been a frequent option for the soldiers, desperate women left behind in the ravages of a town.

He’d learnt to fuck insincerely from these women. It was a rite of passage for the men to take new recruits to a local brothel. The woman they’d procured was at least two decades older than him, thin and desperately tired. She’d run her hands through his hair, murmured to him in flat French phrases, summoned a flicker of interest in her eyes. When he’d asked if she would teach him a little French instead, she’d barely shrugged – surprise had ceased to be a relevant emotion for her.

“Si vous voulez, monsieur. Il est de votre argent.”

First French, later German – his sergeant had always wondered how he’d picked up languages so fast.

His closest attachments had been with other soldiers, boys not much older than himself. With much of the war won, there had been a relatively permissive attitude in the ranks. There was one corporal in particular – he smiles at the memory. Corporal Billy Jones, eyes of a saint and mouth of a sinner. Billy had headed back to – Iowa? Ohio? He’d probably married his high-school sweetheart by now. A real pity.

Billy had taught him to play poker, and then to win at poker, which were two separate matters. He’d also given the young Napoleon an introduction to a variety of petty criminal activities. Most of the platoon’s illicit trade had run through Billy’s fingers and Napoleon had been a fast learner.

It had been a woman, though, who’d introduced him to the world of lock-picking. Food and cigarettes had been going missing from camp for a week when he’d caught Marta red-handed. They’d both been somewhere they shouldn’t, but his uniform distracted her from his guilty expression. She’d made a deal with him – a tutorial on locks in return for his silence.

He’d found her a few years later resuming her father’s locksmith business in Frankfurt. She’d been a useful local fence until she’d rolled him to the authorities to clear her own back. He’d had to leave his first good suit in her bedroom; for him, women are usually harder to read.

The small brunette by his side is a case in point. It had been extremely enjoyable watching Peril fall hopelessly in love with her – he’s developed a fraternal affection for the angry giant, and watching the man clumsily flirt was as heart-warming as it was hilarious. But Gaby’s sentiments are harder to judge. At first glance, her emotions are written all over her face, but they’re superficial – fear, irritation, boredom. Her deeper feelings are harder to detect, a lesson he learned only too well in Rome.

Which makes it even more surprising that he trusts her. It’s far more impressive than the fact that he isn’t trying to sleep with her. After all, the list of women he’s ever trusted is much shorter than – well, he’s aware it says “womaniser” on his file.

He’d tried, of course. The night he’d whisked her over the Wall, he’d lazily offered to welcome her to the West and she’d shot him down. After that – well, firstly he didn’t want Peril beating seven types of hell out of him for touching her, but mainly it had occurred to him that Gaby simply _wasn’t interested_.

Perhaps it’s her German upbringing. His usual attitude of debonair savoir faire cuts precisely no ice with her. Since Peril’s been gone, he and Gaby have posed as a couple more often than not, sharing hotel rooms and drowning their sorrows from the mini-bar. He’d wondered whether she would seek some comfort from him, but clearly she isn’t built that way.

But being forced out of his usual habits has borne unexpected fruit. She’s always game for a drink, loves breaking Waverly’s rules about restaurant budgets, and plays an excellent card game. He actually caught himself offering up an anecdote about his mother a few weeks ago, and he doesn’t normally mention her unless under sedation.

“Bruno my pet,” his drinking buddy says, “if one more person steps on my toes, I am going to stab them. If you want to prevent violence, I suggest you take me dancing or get me a drink.”

“Dance _then_ a drink?”

“Deal.”

Fischer / Müller is still nowhere to be seen, so he leads her on to the floor as the band change from the sedate waltz to a more charged tango. Gaby’s proficiency as a dancer outstrips his own, but it’s easy to misdirect the audience from his lack of polish and he can’t resist the urge to be the centre of attention. He feels the room’s eyes turn towards them as he showily dips her.

Peril and his partner have moved to the side; he can feel the Russian’s glare, acutely conscious of his hand resting in the small of Gaby’s back. Thankfully, Yael mutters something in his ear before the finger tapping begins. Illya turns unwillingly.

Napoleon follows his glance, and spots their quarry on a balcony near a very nice Monet original, if he’s any judge.

“Livia, we’ve made our point. And our friend appears to have arrived. How about I get you that drink now?”

They exit the dancefloor to a smattering of polite applause. The plan is flexible but essentially simple. If possible, Napoleon will plant a tracker and a bug on Fischer’s dinner jacket, while Gaby will do the same to his coat by flirting her way into the cloakroom. As a side project, they are to try and distract Illya and the Israeli from making contact.

Watching Peril make his way through the crowds towards Fischer, he realises there is one flaw in their plan. With the Russian’s expertise in surveillance, and the limited trust the KGB have in Mossad, they’d calculated that Illya would be the one to bug Fischer. But Yael has disappeared. He looks around for the Israeli, but she’s managed to entirely blend into the scenery.

“Plan B, Livia. Why don’t you get yourself a drink and rekindle an old acquaintance?”

Gaby cottons on immediately.

“Of course, darling. You should visit the Monet. Better be quick, I expect it’ll be very popular.”

With some sort of sixth sense, Gaby presses a light kiss to his cheek just as Illya glances back at them. Peril’s face darkens as she reaches up to wipe off a smear of lipstick. He plays along, running a hand proprietarily down her back.

“That should about do it, I think,” she murmurs. “We’ll be at the bar, if you need us.”

Yes, Gaby is excellent company. He’s just glad he’s not the one in love with her.

* * *

 

There’s a victory march ringing in her ears as she sets off towards the bar. She’s spent the last few weeks confident that she wasn’t jealous of Yael working with Illya, but clearly that was an elaborate self-deception. Illya has always steadfastly refused to dance during missions; what on earth would make him change that now if not the partner he’s with?

She’s been riding the swell of anger for the past hour, and it’s threatening to overwhelm her mission. She works her way through the crowd at the bar, and orders a vodka martini like it’s a drink of water in the Sahara.

A few moments later, there’s a familiar presence to her right. It’s the closest she’s been to him for almost three months, and the urge to lean in slightly is overwhelming. Acutely conscious of every movement, she takes delivery of the martini, deliberately ignores him while he orders a vodka, and forces her hand to rest lightly on the glass as she sips. They wait in silence until the barman delivers his drink.

She sips again, grits her teeth, and waits.

“You seem to be enjoying Cowboy’s company,” he mutters, staring into his untouched drink.

“He’s a very charming man. Easy company to enjoy.” She pauses, and then undoes all her good work. “I thought you didn’t dance?”

“I am fast learner. And is easy enough, with a good partner.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

He ignores her. “You are not wearing your ring.”

“Wouldn’t it be something of a security risk this evening, given the current state of play? You don’t have the best track record in respecting people’s privacy.”

“You usually wear it, then.”

It’s a statement, not a question. _Damn_.

“That’s not really your concern.”

He subtly ghosts his fingers down her back, covered by the number of people around them. Her body language goes to hell.

“I would not have put you in that dress.” His voice is low, solicitous.

“Are you questioning my husband’s taste? He helped me into it personally.”

It’s a cheap blow, and a lie at that, but it seems to work. His tone cools noticeably.

“It is not my place to question your husband’s taste, _madame_.”

He pushes aside his untouched glass and moves away. She finishes the martini, then weaves her way around the crush to cut him off. She glances up to the balcony. From this angle, Fischer still appears to be alone and Illya is heading towards the staircase.

There is an obvious course of action, one which satisfies a number of her purposes. The darker area under the balcony is made up of a series of alcoves in which a number of couples are flirting a little more heavily than is really appropriate. She mutters a short prayer that she’s doing the right thing, and drags Illya into an empty alcove.

“Not so fast, _monsieur_. The French have an enchantingly relaxed attitude to infidelity. Perhaps my husband’s taste isn’t to my liking.” She tosses her head, coquettishly.

It doesn’t work.

“I’m not going to be part of your mission with Cowboy,” he growls.

“This is hardly part of my mission, Illya.” The statement is hollow in her ears.

“I do not enjoy doing this with you,” he says flatly, and gently pushes her aside.

“Illya – wait.” She’s not sure if it’s the urgency of the mission or the disappointment in his voice, but this time her voice sounds like her again, and he stops. Her pride plays a short tug of war against the need for honesty.

“I miss you. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

Some of the tension visibly drains out of his shoulders, and she tugs him round, reaching her hands up around his neck.

“ _я скучаю по тебе,”_ she whispers into his ear.

His familiar rumble rolls through her. “I miss you too, little chop shop girl.”

She has no idea why he has this effect on her. It’s stronger than anything she’s felt before – a magnetic pull towards his voice, an internal ache that starts when he touches her. Three months apart may have something to do with it, but she is beginning to understand why people do crazy things when sex is involved. Her whole body is responding to him, her rationality swept along by a tidal wave of hormones.

“Not here, малютка,” he warns, and she comes to her senses. She pulls back slightly, rests her cheek on his lapel and carefully untangles her hands from his neck. There’s a slight reluctance to break contact, one hand lingering a little longer on his collar than the other, and then they’re separated.

She looks around, but no-one has noticed anything amiss – the French really are gloriously indifferent to certain improprieties.

“We should get back to our partners,” and again the regret in her voice comes easily. “When will I see you again?”

“Soon, I promise.”

He steps out into the throng of people, just in time to see Fischer stroll by, flanked by Napoleon and Yael. She looks to Illya, but he seems as surprised as she is. The unlikely trio proceed to the bar, where Fischer shakes Solo’s hand and kisses Yael on both cheeks, French-style. Utterly mystified, she watches as her target bids her partner _adieu_ and heads to the exit.

With no idea about the state of play, there’s no way she can intercept without potentially ruining the mission. She follows Fischer out anyway, only to helplessly watch him collect his unbugged overcoat and disappear into a waiting taxi.

A moment later, Illya and Yael sweep past her and head off down the pavement at a dignified stroll, then Solo materialises at her side with her coat. No-one else seems unduly concerned at the turn of events; not for the first time, being the least experienced agent is infuriating.

“Did you have fun catching up with your old friend, my dear?” Solo says calmly.

“Not as much fun as you appear to have had with your new friends,” she retorts. “Perhaps you would care to tell me about it on our way home?”

* * *

 

He’d been oddly apprehensive as he’d headed up to the Monet. Yael was an unknown quantity. He was able to predict fairly accurately what Illya would do in most given situations – a chess game where the number of likely moves vastly reduced if Gaby was in the vicinity.

But the Israeli was a blank canvas – he only knew of her physical capabilities. Would she use those to bug her target? Did she have a cover story? Their plan’s flexibility suddenly seemed thin. It was the second time that he’d been made to feel underprepared by her.

He'd positioned himself in a suitable corner, keeping Fischer slightly out of his eyeline. A few moments later, Yael suddenly fades back into view. It takes him a second to recognise her because without changing an iota of her outfit, she had become an entirely different person. Now she held herself primly, awkwardly. The dress that had been sensuous on the dancefloor now hung from her a little dowdily. Her walk, her hands – every pore radiated unease in this social setting. He was impressed.

She walks past Fischer once, as if steeling her nerve, and then turns back.

“Professor Müller?” she quavers. He tilts his head at her accent.

“Oui, mademoiselle.”

“Bonsoir, je m’appelle Mademoiselle Eliza Blythe. Je crois que, je crois… oh look here, my French is utterly awful. Would you mind terribly if we used English?”

“As you wish, my dear – may I ask what you want with me?”

“Oh yes, goodness me, I’m frightfully sorry to intrude. I’m a student with Professor Mackenzie at Oxford, and I’m absolutely in awe of your research. I believe he wrote you saying I’d be in Paris?”

Unbelievably, comprehension dawns on Fischer’s face. Napoleon can’t see Yael’s face, but Fisher is radiating benevolent approval at her perfect cut-glass English accent.

“Of course, Miss Blythe – I received his letter only two days ago and was about to post him my reply. He says you’ve been extremely useful to him with his latest experiments.”

“Oh thank goodness – I am so sorry for the abrupt introduction. A colleague at the Institut was meant to speak to Director Peltier and arrange our introduction, but he disappeared off to the bar and I can’t for the life of me locate him. It’s more crowded in here than a colony of Staphylococcus in a two-week old petri dish.”

This is apparently a hilarious joke in the microbiology field, and as Solo quietly works his way around them, they continue to discuss various ins and outs of current research. He mentally cues up Yael’s file. She had indeed studied at Oxford for a time, but the file hadn’t gone into much detail on the subject. He’d bet a considerable sum that she’d studied some sort of medical science.

He’s far enough round now to see her face. She’s better acting with her body than with her face – her expressions are all present and correct, but they don’t quite reach her eyes. She’s missing a layer of authenticity. Nevertheless, Fischer seems convinced. He’s offering her a tour of his lab, and all the pieces click into place.

“Oh gosh, I would love that! But I’m only in Paris for a few days – it’s meant to be a holiday but I’d _much_ rather visit your laboratory than hang around with family at more stuffy lunches and dinners.”

“I quite agree my dear – I loathe these parties. Time here is time away from useful research. I’m only making a brief appearance tonight to make Peltier happy.”

“Oh, then I’m so pleased I caught you!”

“As you say, my dear. I’m happy to help. There is a great deal you can learn from observation of the leading lights in the field – the thought processes, the methods… There are those who believe women have no place in the field of hard science, but in my experience, women can be some of the most useful assistants. Attention to detail my dear – it’s a skill that the fairer sex far more commonly possesses.”

Yael swallows the condescension admirably, with only the slightest twitch of her mouth to betray how much she must want to punch the man.

“How about two pm tomorrow?” he continues. “I have a seminar in the morning but I have at least an hour in the afternoon to spare for a bright and inquiring mind.”

“That would be marvellous, Professor. I’m so grateful.”

Fischer inclines his head, taking the adulation he is due.

“And now, my dear, it’s time for me to escape. Let me escort you back to your colleague at the bar – I’m sure together we can locate him.”

It’s time to make his move. He’s ready to trip over an obliging bystander when Yael sees him. There’s a flash of recognition in her eyes and suddenly an alternative course of action presents itself. It’s risky, but he’s always loved the high-risk games. He paints a relieved look on his face and plunges in.

“Eliza! Thank goodness, I thought I’d never find you in this madhouse. Ah, Professor Müller, I presume? My apologies – I’m Henry, her cousin and chaperone.”

Fischer’s expression goes through dismay, relief, then settles into mild disapproval.

“Another scientist, perhaps?”

“Oh no, Eliza got all the brains in our family. I’m more of an artist – I’m only here for the collection. The Monet is really quite something, don’t you think?”

“I am afraid I do not appreciate art,” Fischer says stiffly.

“Pity. Well, thank you for taking care of my cousin. She really is quite besotted with your work.” He reaches forward and grasps the man’s hand, pumping it while clasping his shoulder. “It’s a shame, really. My aunt has quite given up on her finding a husband. Such a waste of a pretty face.”

Fischer makes a face at the impropriety, and turns away as Yael protests, giving him the perfect opening to slip the tracker into the breast pocket of the man’s dinner jacket. He’s sure Yael has spotted it, but there’s little she can do to get rid of it without calling into question her cover.

“Professor Müller was just escorting me down to find Dr Smirnov by the bar, Henry,” she says, grimly playing along. “But now you’ve decided to stop mooning about over the pictures, perhaps we can all go down together?”

“Splendid.” He offers Yael his arm. Fischer, not to be outdone, appears at her other elbow, and they proceed awkwardly downstairs together. They pass Illya and Gaby, making a very poor attempt at keeping their hands off each other, and then there’s really nothing left to do but to wave him goodbye.

“What do you think you’re doing?” hisses the Israeli agent, her English accent disintegrating as their target moves out of earshot.

He takes a moment to study her face. He reads irritation, frustration, and…the defences go up. Her face settles back into her professional mask. _Women_. Gaby is a maze – there are lots of clues and paths but most of them lead round in circles. Yael is a safe where even the lock is hidden – all smooth, impenetrable surfaces.

He waits a second longer, but silence simply allows her to finish recomposing herself.

“I was being opportunistic, _Miss Blythe_. You should understand that – you like disrupting well-laid plans.”

Illya joins them. “Time to go, Eliza.”

“Goodbye _Henry_. Perhaps tomorrow afternoon you should visit the Louvre. I don’t think I need a chaperone in a science laboratory.”

She sweeps out, her dowdy persona discarded. He follows them out to meet Gaby and recaps his version of events.

By the time he’s finished, they’re back in the hotel. Rather than pour herself a drink, she heads straight to the dressing room and starts struggling out of her dress.

“So Yael has a date with the target, where he could tell her all sort of useful information,” she snaps, “and we have...?”

“We have a tracker in his dinner jacket. He’s got to go home at _some_ point tonight so we’ll get an address eventually. And we know he’ll be out tomorrow. Plenty of time to set up proper surveillance. Do you want a hand with that?”

The dressing room door slams shut. “I’ll take that as a no, then. What did you manage with Peril – other than flirting?”

There’s silence for a moment and then the door opens. Gaby stalks out in nondescript dark clothes – her surveillance outfit.

“I put a tracker in _his_ dinner jacket. And now I’m off to steal their intelligence.”

“You did what?”

She rolls her eyes at him, and opens the tracking console.

“It wasn’t that hard, actually.”

“Not _that hard_? I’ve been trying to bug Peril for _months_. He always finds them. Where the hell did you put the tracker?” He can’t resist. “Exactly how intimate did you get in that alcove?”

She tsks under her breath as she keys in the specific code for her tracker. “I put it under the collar of his dinner jacket – at the back.”

She demonstrates for him, one hand pulling a spare tracker from her bracelet and pinning it out of sight while the other one slides down his lapel. It’s masterful, the sleight of hand simple but effective. He takes off his jacket and inspects the collar. She’s pinned it so subtly that it barely makes a bump in the material.

“Well, then. Let’s see if he’s spotted it.”

He changes while the tracker calibrates. It’s giving off a clear, static signal from about quarter of a mile away, towards Les Tuileries.

“Excellent work, Gaby.” He leans over the small console. “But I’ll be the one who steals the intelligence.”

She wheels around to face him. “Not a chance – I planted the tracker, I can handle this!”

“I’ll admit you’ve outdone me on the tracker,” he says, discreetly pocketing the console. “Although I think you have an unfair advantage when it comes to Illya.”

“Don’t be a sore loser, Solo.”

“Nevertheless, I’m still better at locks. Don’t wait up.”

He shuts the hotel room door a moment before the vase shatters against the other side. It’s worth incurring Gaby’s wrath – he’s damned if that Israeli agent is going to outmanoeuvre him twice in a row.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Si vous voulez, monsieur. Il est de votre argent.” = “If you like, sir. It’s your money.”
> 
> я скучаю по тебе = “I miss you” – although I am reliant on Google Translate for this!


	4. Deux Hôtels

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one where the team get back together again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Um, so this gets pretty NSFW. Fair warning.)
> 
> This one wrote itself, frankly. Hope it's up to scratch!

**Paris**

He stops outside the hotel room door, double checks it’s the right one, and knocks.

There’s no answer.

He’s pretty sure she’s in there. Waverly confirmed the location on the pretext that his visit is to start planning the next day’s work. He doesn’t think UNCLE’s fittingly avuncular director has any illusions about his ulterior motives, but there’s not much Waverly can do about it while he’s on his way from Bonn.

He knocks again and after a few moments, the door swings open.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

Gaby is holding her customary glass of vodka, wearing pyjamas and a scowl.

“Hello to you too, малютка.”

“You’re meant to be in Tuileries.”

He is confused. “Did Waverly give you our location too?”

“No, you idiot. I put a tracker on you at the party.”

“You did _what?_ ”

“Why does everyone keep acting so surprised about that?” She flounces back into the room, and he trails uncertainly after her. This wasn’t the welcome he was expecting.

“Where is the tracker?” He’s changed out of his evening dress, so he quells the urge to pat himself down. He knows it’s hypocritical, but the idea of someone bugging his clothes sets off an internal itch. It’s why he’s so vigilant – particularly as Cowboy seems to have made it a personal mission to successfully bug his entire wardrobe.

“I slipped it under your dinner jacket collar at the party.”

He revisits their encounter, notes where it must have happened, kicks himself for letting her slip through his defences so easily.

“My fault to think you just missed me. Where is Cowboy?”

“Gone to steal all your intelligence.”

“He’s doing _what?_ No, no, no. I have just spent half hour on phone with Waverly and my agency convincing them to bring UNCLE into mission.”

She smirks slightly. “Oops.”

He sighs. He had forgotten how unbelievably infuriating they both are.

“I should call Yael. Cowboy could get hurt sneaking into her room.”

Gaby’s face suggests that she wouldn’t mind someone giving Solo a black eye. It’s nice to see someone else, _especially_ the Cowboy, taking the flak for once.

“Very well then, if you _must_.” She waves him inside and heads for the drinks cabinet. “Is that the only reason you came over?”

“No. I came to see you.”

She turns to him, her expression unreadable. “Did you, now.”

He tries not to be intimidated. “I – I came to see if you and Cowboy, if you –,” he tails off, as her face darkens.

He knows how she feels about his jealous tendencies. But then, she went nuclear over him dancing with Yael earlier. He thought that he’d learnt to read her moods better, but three months apart means he’s back to being constantly off-balance around her.

“I said I would see you again soon,” he finishes, lamely.

“I see.”

She turns and walks into the dressing room. “The phone is over there,” she gestures, and shuts the door.

He sighs, and picks up the phone.

* * *

“Да, я понимаю.”

Yael turns from the phone, and looks across at the American agent.

“So, now that we’re all friends again,” he smiles, “do you think you might reconsider untying me?”

He’d knocked on her door half an hour earlier. She’d been revising her cover notes for tomorrow, after Illya had disappeared off to speak to one or both of his two masters. She’d frozen, switched off the reading lamp silently, and scaled the large wardrobe in the corner.

The KGB’s file on him hadn’t underplayed his skills – the lock had clicked open as smoothly as if he was using the hotel key. She’d watched him creep in, inspect the dark room and all the normal hiding places, and unerringly locate the safe with the intelligence files.

That’s when she’d made her move. He’d been too focused on the safe to pay attention to the tiny creaks the wood gave as she crept down. By the time she was on the rug, he’d missed his chance – the soft pile underfoot allowed her to be completely silent.

But once he’d been suitably subdued, she wasn’t really sure what to do next. Witty repartee isn’t her strong suit, and Solo appeared entirely unconcerned about his capture.

“Not that I’m complaining, Miss Dayan, but this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for this evening.”

He’d quirked an eyebrow at his restraints, somehow conveying complete ease in the desk chair, despite all four limbs being tied down with a selection of Illya’s ties.

“Now, I don’t mean to patronise you, but I suspect I have more experience with this _particular_ sort of evening entertainment than you, and I have to say – normally it involves a lot fewer clothes.”

She’d not known how to respond.

“If you want to go first, of course,” he’d smirked, “then I will of course be more than happy to work with that.”

It had been a considerable relief when the phone rang, but the change from competition to partner doesn’t seem to have affected his attempts to flirt. She quickly unties the main knots, leaving him to struggle out of the rest. It doesn’t stop him from talking.

“If we are now all on the same team, I have to know – how long is your cover going to last? I assume you faked a letter from Mackenzie to set up your Miss Blythe cover? I do hope our Professor isn’t very punctual replying to correspondence otherwise the jig’ll be up in a day or so.”

She tries not to roll her eyes.

“We have an agent at the post office. That’s all you need to know.”

“You do realise that the CIA are protecting this man? They will also check his letters, and messages like, ‘let me introduce this complete stranger to you,’ send large red flags. Your rendezvous tomorrow with Fischer could be a trap.”

“If your CIA calls Professor Mackenzie, he will confirm that a Miss Blythe does indeed exist, although he will struggle to recall if he wrote to Fischer about her. The man is incapable of remembering anything that happens outside his laboratory in any detail whatsoever.”

“It’s still a big risk.”

In spite of her resolution to remain calm, her hackles rise. “And one I am willing to take, Mr Solo. So far Kuryakin and I have managed to carry out our aims despite your interference. We may be working with you and Miss Teller now, but please do not mistake enforced co-operation for an open invitation.”

His eyes narrow, and she realises her carefully constructed barriers have slipped. The American is like water – no, like desert sand. No matter how well you build your walls, sand always creeps in. Her skin prickles under his scrutiny.

“You really are a very curious creature, Miss Dayan. I can’t decide whether you actually _have_ a personality, or if it’s just cold professionalism all the way down.”

He’s fishing, and she forces herself not to react.

“I’d rather you stopped investigating my personality, Mr Solo, and started focusing on our target.”

He raises an eyebrow, undeterred. “Now a suspicious man might start to wonder if you had something to hide in there. And I’m only alive today because I’m a suspicious man.”

She stares back at him blandly, trying to think of ways to make him leave. The seconds begin to stretch out painfully. When the telephone rings again, it takes all of her training not to jump.

She puts on her English accent to answer the phone, and an equally English voice responds.

“Miss Dayan, I believe? What a pleasure to be talking with you. Director Amit speaks very highly of you.”

“Who is this?”

“Forgive me. This is Alexander Waverly, British Intelligence.” The voice switches smoothly into Hebrew, “Could I please talk to my agent?”

She responds in her native tongue, “Illya isn’t here.”

“I meant Mr Solo, Agent Dayan. He _is_ currently in your room making a nuisance of himself, isn’t he?”

She has reached her limit of surprises for the evening, so she simply holds the phone out towards the American.

“Waverly? How the devil did you know I was here?”

She can hear the other man’s voice echoing down the line. “Intuition, my dear boy. And a quick conversation with your colleague.”

“You spoke to Gaby?”

“No, I spoke to Illya, who is at present in your room debriefing her. I’ll arrive in Paris in an hour. Be back at the hotel then with Miss Dayan for a briefing about tomorrow’s activities. Oh, and Solo? When you do get back, I suggest you knock first.”

Solo smiles as his boss rings off, confirming her suspicions about the Russian’s attachment to the German girl. He turns to her, receiver in hand.

“Well Miss Dayan, it seems we have an hour to kill. Shall we order some room service on the KGB’s bill? Champagne, perhaps?”

She grits her teeth. “Please get out of my room, Agent Solo.”

He has the nerve to look mildly affronted. “But how will you know where our hotel is? No, I’m afraid you’re stuck with me for an hour. It’s a marvellous opportunity to get to know each other better.”

She’s in hell. If he were just trying to seduce her, that would be manageable – she knows four different ways to quickly render him unconscious for about forty-five minutes. But he’s not actually hitting on her, not really. He’s trying to _unlock_ her. She retreats to the other side of the room, putting the couch as a physical barrier between them and starts mentally counting down from a thousand.

“Now, where shall we start? What _do_ you like to drink, if not champagne?”

* * *

After Waverly rings off, he takes a moment to look around the hotel suite. Gaby still hasn’t appeared out of the walk-in dressing room, and he needs something to distract himself.

It is a sharp cut above the place the KGB put him – for all Waverly’s protestations about budget, their accommodation is always obscenely luxurious. The bath is easily large enough for two, for example. The bedroom thankfully has two separate beds, but he’s sorely tempted to quickly wire a couple of bugs into the reading lamps.

Back in the safe haven of the sitting room, he notes the denuded drinks cabinet. After eyeing the couch, he finds a half-empty whisky bottle nestled up against one of the cushions. There’s still no word from the dressing room and his nerves are beginning to fray. If this is a sort of elaborate torture, it’s surprisingly effective. He gives in, and takes a swig.

He wanders back to the desk, half-conscious that he’s still dangling the bottle from one hand, and starts shamelessly snooping through a few papers – all part of their cover and innocuous enough. He’s raising the bottle to his lips once more when he hears a throat being cleared from the direction of the dressing room.

He turns, and his mouth goes dry. Gaby is wearing a set of midnight blue La Perla lingerie that he’d included in her Madrid wardrobe and had never seen her wear. It had been the most brazenly flirtatious thing he’d ever done, emboldened by a recent thaw in her capricious behaviour towards him. Two days later, she’d _deliberately_ pulled a wire out of her monitoring device, and he’d had to reattach it to the top of a stocking held in place by a midnight blue suspender belt.

Ever since then, he’d fantasised about her wearing it for him in a situation just like this. She sashays across the room in higher heels than he’d ever seen her wear before. Gaby does not normally channel _femme fatale_ , but she’s doing a sensational job of it now.

“Aren’t you going to say anything, Illya?” she asks archly, coming to a stop a few feet from the side of the desk.

He isn’t sure he can actually formulate a sentence. “малютка –,” he begins.

“You know,” she cuts him off, wandering towards a window, “I’m not sure whether I’m angrier at you for turning up here out of jealousy over Napoleon, or for your behaviour at the ball tonight. I’d like you to explain yourself, I think.”

He blinks, stupidly, and tries to gather his thoughts. This isn’t a seduction, it’s an interrogation – under torture.

He tries again, “I was doing job, is all.”

“We worked together for practically a year and you never _once_ danced with me. ‘Can’t and won’t,’ were your exact words in Athens, I believe.”

She turns from the window, and faces him, hands on hips. He gives in.

“Your file said – it said – all your recent missions with Cowboy were as married couple. When I heard you were in Paris as another couple, I was mad. So – so I try to make you jealous, I dance with Yael.”

She tilts her head to one side, evaluating his response. One finger taps her bottom lip, and then drifts down to trace a line along the edge of the lace brassiere, following the curve of one small, perfect breast.

The blood is pounding in his ears, his breathing ragged. His mind can’t help but imagine his tongue following the line of her finger, sliding under the edge of the lace to reach one pink nipple, his hands on those small hips.

“Illya, _concentrate,_ ” his torturer demands. “Don’t you think that’s a bit hypocritical? You’ve posed as a couple with Yael, too, according to Waverly.”

“I…I…I,” – he’s a gibbering wreck. _Pull yourself together, Kuryakin_. “Is different, I swear. She is just agent – not friend, not more. Always professional, does not share personal…”

Her fingers drift down across her torso to play with the top of her suspender belt, and he breaks.

“I do not even like her! She reminds me – but – she is not you. When I met her, I thought – I thought I had you back. But no. She is always reminder that I miss you. Please, малютка. I’m sorry.”

She crosses to stand in front of him, her heels bringing her up a little closer to his face than normal.

“Are you sure?”

He nods weakly. “I did not mean to make you so mad, my little chop shop girl.”

“Of course I’m mad, Illya. I’ve been sharing hotel rooms with Solo for _two months_. I cannot possibly give him the satisfaction of hearing me relieve some tension. I’m _dying_ here.”

The relief washes over him like a tidal wave, and he’s finally brave enough to slide his hands over her shoulders, and down her arms. She closes her eyes and to his delight, he realises she’s breathing heavily too.

He forces himself to be gentle with his kisses, to move slowly, lifting her on to the desk and doing just what he was imagining a few minutes ago. Her fingers tangle in his hair, legs wrapping around him as he switches to the other breast.

He slides a hand down between her legs, where the thin fabric is wet to the touch. He realises how much she enjoyed pushing his buttons, how much she likes to see him weakening for her. He had always tried to hide that hunger, thinking it would scare her away.

He conducts a heady experiment, whispering in her ear some of the fantasies he had indulged in while they were apart, the number of cold showers he had taken, and is rewarded with her pushing against his fingers and moaning into his shoulder.

His triumph is short-lived when she whispers, “Illya! Solo and Waverly – they’ll be here soon.”

She pushes him back, slipping off the desk and sliding her underwear to the floor. Her suspenders are still on, and as she turns to the desk drawer, he can’t help but run his hands along the stays pressed gently into her bare skin.

“Illya,” she protests, turning back to face him, “always with too many clothes. Hurry up!”

He doesn’t even bother taking his shoes off. Gaby divests him of the essentials as fast as possible and presses him down on the couch. She settles over him, still in suspenders, bra and heels, and the urgency of her movements almost ends everything far too soon.

He has to focus on something else, and desperately imagines the embarrassment of Cowboy walking in on them in this position. In his overheated state, the mental image is almost – almost _exciting_. Slightly shocked at himself, he settles on the safer theme of recalling various winter physical training exercises at the academy until he regains a semblance of control.

He doesn’t need to balance on the edge for very long though, because Gaby falls apart a few moments later in a flurry of gasps and mumbled German words, and he can tumble after her.

Despite the time pressure, he can’t bear to move her while she’s draped so gloriously over him, so they simply lie there for a few minutes. He fights the inevitable drowsiness.

“Come, little chop shop girl. We need to have meeting with boss and fellow agents.”

She groans, and reluctantly untangles herself, disappearing off into the bathroom. He restores his clothes and the room to some semblance of order, while Gaby drifts into the dressing room in a robe.

She makes it in the nick of time, because a moment later Cowboy knocks and enters practically instantaneously. He fancies he sees a touch of disappointment on the American’s face, until the Cowboy’s gaze drifts to his hair and the disappointment changes to a smirk. Gaby’s hands must have left him looking thoroughly dishevelled. He tries not to look bothered, while Yael drifts into the room.

“You’re early,” he states.

“Miss Dayan here _insisted_ that we come across now, I’m afraid. Anyone would think that she wasn’t enjoying my company,” explains Solo, looking entirely unrepentant.

Yael is wearing her customary neutral expression, but her eyes flash slightly at his comment, and Illya feels a touch of sympathy for her.

Gaby reappears in casual slacks and a sweater, but is completely given away by her tumbled hair and the satisfied smile on her face as she meets his eye. It’s made even more obvious by the fact that all three of them turn to look at her as she enters – usually it’s only he who swings to face her like a magnet finding true north.

Her smile fades as she takes in the newcomers. She’s still angry at Solo for something, he recalls, and the last time she was this close to Yael the two were aiming punches at each other. The atmosphere in the room noticeably cools as the two women take note of each other.

“Miss Teller,” Yael intones, her voice bland and professional.

“Miss Dayan.” Gaby doesn’t quite manage the same level of neutrality.

He can feel Cowboy working himself up to a snide comment. The American opens his mouth just as there’s a blessed knock on the door.

He’s across to open it a fraction too quickly, but then Waverly is inside, introducing himself to Yael and fussing around as if the gathering was a polite party, not a plotting session in the depths of night.

“Isn’t this nice? We’re all back together again, with a new friend to boot. Miss Dayan, I gather you’ve cleverly arranged a little tête-à-tête with our favourite professor tomorrow afternoon?”

Yael inclines her head in an approximation of a nod.

“Capital, capital. And Solo, you’ve tracked our friend Fischer to a charming building in the fifth _arrondissement_. Excellent. So now, I’ve had a rather fun idea about tomorrow’s activities.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Да, я понимаю = “Yes, I understand.” As always, I'm afraid my Russian is dependent on Google, so profuse apologies for mistakes!


	5. A Dance with the Devil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yael has a date with Fischer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a pretty short chapter, but the next one is turning into a bit of a beast. I'll try and get it up soon!
> 
> By the by, there’s one very brief reference to sexual harassment in this chapter. It’s plot-relevant, but I didn’t deem it significant enough to change my Archive warnings. Please let me know if you think I’ve misjudged there.

**Institut Nationale de Médecine, Paris**

There are three reasons why Gaby is furious at present. The first is because she’s been given the least exciting job, the second is because she has to work with Yael, and the third is because she’s awkwardly squeezed into a cleaning closet with a mop and bucket for company.

At least being uncomfortable is stopping her from nodding off. Yael and Fischer have essentially been talking a different language for half an hour now. She recognises some of the words, but others – _plasmid_ , _recombinant DNA_ , _restriction enzymes_ , _DNA ligases_ – would be equally opaque if they were speaking German.

At present, Yael is enthusing about something called a bacteriophage. Gaby has begun to count ceiling tiles when the Israeli finally says something interesting.

“It is such a shame that you can’t move faster, Professor. These bacterial experiments are fascinating, but think of the possibilities if you could test these in animals? The potential implications for human medical care are astounding. Surely you’re ready to move on to plants, at least?”

“My dear girl, I admire your ambition. I cannot possibly confirm whether we have been successful with plant experimentation, but even if we _were_ to have had astonishing success there –,” he pauses dramatically and Gaby imagines Yael simulating wide-eyed admiration, “– the willingness of the international research community to tolerate risky experiments in animals and humans is declining dramatically. There were, after all, suggestions of questionable research practices by my fellow countrymen during the last, terrible conflict. We must be careful to avoid such misguided ventures in the future, which is why I have lent my backing to the recent Helsinki Declaration. Studies on animals and humans will happen all too slowly, I’m afraid.”

The nerve of the man is breath-taking. Gaby has to credit Yael for not missing a beat. In fact, she’s possibly laying it on a little thick.

“But surely the Declaration isn’t completely global? There must be some areas where your genius could be fully developed? It’s for the greater good, Professor!”

“You’re too kind, my dear. I really should not mention this, but you seem to understand the imperative nature of my research...” He pauses, and Gaby holds her breath. “You shouldn’t be surprised if I do take a – _secondment_ , we could call it – with a more encouraging research body. The French have been a little disappointing with meeting my funding needs.”

“A trip east, perhaps?” Yael is walking a very fine line. Her body language must be doing a lot of work to make _that_ question seem innocent.

“The Russians?” Fischer snorts, “The Soviets have barely rid themselves of the stench of Lysenkoism – they’re decades behind the West’s research. No, my dear, no more fishing – you will have to wait to hear about my exciting new project along with the rest of the public.”

Gaby rolls her eyes expressively; the man is insufferable. Yael has giggled and fawned long enough. It’s time to put her out of her misery. She radios to Napoleon, who finished bugging Fischer’s apartment with Illya hours ago. A few moments later, she hears Fischer’s secretary knock on the laboratory door.

“Monsieur le professeur, excuse-moi, il y a un appel téléphonique pour vous. C’est le directeur du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.”

“Maintenant?”

“Oui monsieur, je suis désolée.”

“Apologies Miss Blythe, I must leave you for this call – money talks, you know. Don’t touch anything in the laboratory, please.”

Fischer’s voice slowly recedes, until there’s a click on the line which tells Gaby that Yael has disconnected her wire while she bugs the laboratory. After a few moments, the Israeli’s voice comes through the first of the bugs, “testing, testing,” and Gaby flashes the little light on Yael’s watch to confirm.

Yael fits the other two bugs and reconnects her wire with a minute to spare before Fischer returns, and politely endures him grumpily explaining that the connection to the Director had been appallingly bad.

All there is to do now is make a clean getaway, and as Yael says goodbye to the odious scientist, Gaby packs her surveillance equipment into her bucket, adjusts her cleaner’s tabard, and quietly exits her little closet.

She’s invisible, of course. Waverly’s plan had inescapable logic: _“Joining our teams together is particularly fortuitous. Solo is unparalleled at breaking and entering without there being any actual breaking, per se. Illya is our surveillance expert. Yael has already convinced Fischer to invite her into his lab and Gaby is discreet enough to be the perfect fly on the laboratory wall.”_

Waverly is unfailingly polite. He didn’t need to say that small, dark women in cleaning outfits can wander in and out of buildings without drawing any attention whatsoever. And _not_ saying it doesn’t make her feel any better about her unglamorous role. All the others were experts and proven assets on this case; she’d managed to plant a tracker on her own damn teammate. It was a far cry from her starring role in Rome.

She exits from a nondescript side door, flashes her forged pass at a bored guard, and shuffles along with her mop and bucket a few metres behind Yael – who is anything but invisible in a yellow hat and heels.

Five minutes later, she realises that she’s not the only one trailing her partner. The route Yael is taking is deliberately indirect – she’s paused to check street signs twice now and has doubled back once to take a different turning. For Gaby, this is all a pre-planned dance. She stopped a few minutes earlier to buy a comb from a local stall while Yael made her ‘mistaken’ venture down the wrong street. However, there’s simply no logical reason for the two men in suits to retrace their steps unless they’re following her.

Her heart is beating faster. She’s _been_ followed before; in Rome of course, and then on her own in Athens. That time, Illya had been covering her and had dropped the two would-be attackers without wrinkling his shirt. But she’s never been the back-up before and she’s undeniably nervous.

The fact that Yael clearly doesn’t want her help is just piling on the pressure. The Israeli hadn’t _said_ so, exactly, but her face had spoken volumes as the two women rehearsed their exit strategy earlier today.

She isn’t sure if Yael dislikes her because of her family history (Uncle Rudi’s wartime activities must have been known to Mossad), if she also has feelings for Illya, or if she thinks five prior missions are insufficient to make her a useful teammate. Whatever it is, Yael had flatly resisted her overtures of friendship this morning. Solo calls Yael an unreadable automaton, but Gaby’s getting her message loud and clear.

Yael speeds up slightly, clearly aware of her new shadows, and in trying to keep up Gaby stumbles over her bucket. An idea occurs. In two streets time, Yael is due to get lost again, forcing another about-turn. She plans out the likely moves, falling back a little more as she visualises the three-person choreography they’re about to perform.

Yael gets to the intersection and her step falters. She looks around once, twice, as the men hurriedly find an interest in a local newsstand and their shoelaces. She retraces her steps, drifting past Gaby obliviously, playing the slightly lost tourist perfectly. The men begin to wander back up the road, and Gaby counts down from ten.

She gets to three when she suddenly trips over the bucket again. Her hands fly out to stop herself falling, which sends the mop handle off to the right and into the path of Suit Number One, who hits the deck. The surprise makes her lurch backwards, cannoning into Suit Number Two and clutching wildly at his jacket to stop herself falling.

“Oh mon Dieu! Excuse-moi, je suis désolée.” She mutters some accented French phrases, but the men aren’t listening.

“Goddammit!” Suit One is yelling, in an accent straight out of an American Western. Suit Two hauls him up and they dust themselves off, peering down the street after a yellow hat.

“Aw hell, I think we lost her.” Suit One is not the most subtle of agents. Suit Two shushes him, and Gaby takes care to be very focused on gathering up her cleaning supplies.

“Are you ok, lady?” Suit Two asks, perfunctorily, and she backs away, babbling apologies in her limited French and showing no signs of English comprehension. She watches them erase her from their universe, and they set off down the street after their quarry.

She takes care to toil off down the street for another couple of minutes, before taking a sharp left into a narrow street. Through a little trial and error, she ends up in the same alleyway as Yael, who is now unrecognisable in a boring brown coat and shoes. She hands Gaby a small valise containing the yellow hat and heels, and Gaby fishes her own bag out from behind some wooden pallets. She stuffs her tabard and the surveillance equipment inside, gives it to Yael, and ditches the mop and bucket into a large dumpster.

“They were American,” she says. “I’d guess a basic CIA tail.”

Yael nods once, which is as close as Gaby thinks she’s going to get to saying “well done”. Even Illya is more forthcoming. There’s an awkward silence, then the Israeli exits down one end of the alley and Gaby heads off down the other.

She keeps the lid on the adrenalin rush until she makes it back to the hotel, where she practically floats up seven flights of stairs, dances through the suite, and takes a flying leap onto the bed.

She’s catching her breath when a slight noise from the bathroom brings her to her senses. Yael’s route home had been planned longer to avoid them arriving at the hotel at the same time. She should be alone.

She locates her gun quietly and creeps to the bathroom door. It’s not needed. Inside, Yael is hugging the toilet bowl, heaving and retching forcefully.

The shock renders her immobile. Yael is incapable of acknowledging her presence, so time stops while she helplessly takes in the details; the tears rolling down the woman’s cheeks, white knuckles gripping the porcelain seat, the uncontrollable shuddering as her body convulses.

Yael finally manages to bring up everything she’s eaten that day, and it jolts Gaby into action. Operating on autopilot, she fetches water, runs a bath, disposes of Yael’s dress and helps her get her shoes off. Ten minutes later, she’s sitting by the taps watching Yael try to scrub away every memory of the encounter in the lab. They’ve not spoken a word, but the Israeli is telling quite an eloquent story through her silence.

It isn’t until she’s out of the bath and on the couch, fully dressed in one of Gaby’s outfits, that Yael actually confirms it, speaking largely to herself and staring into space.

“He tried to kiss me on the way out. He _touched_ me. After what those hands. What they’ve _done_. And he’s not sorry. He’s not sorry at all.”

She mutters to herself in her own language for a few more minutes, hands clenching and unclenching. Gaby instinctively covers them with her own. Yael recoils slightly but she doesn’t shake off the contact, and the two women sit there for a few minutes; the niece of the Nazi torturer watching the tension slowly drain out of the Jewish agent’s body.

A knock on the door brings Yael out of her reverie. Waverly enters after a polite pause (something Napoleon and Illya have yet to learn) during which Yael retrieves her hands and retreats behind her calm and professional wall. Napoleon and Illya follow close behind, and in the debriefing and back slapping that ensues, Gaby senses a rare moment of intimacy has slipped away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The descriptions of genetic research I allude to here are vaguely period-appropriate. Watson and Crick described the double helix form of DNA in Cambridge in 1953, and were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. (It's worth noting that Rosalind Franklin's work in the 1950s heavily supported this discovery and she should probably have been awarded a Nobel Prize for Chemistry. However she died of cancer at the age of 37, and the importance of her work was largely overlooked until after her death.)
> 
> Plasmids were discovered in the 1950s, while restriction enzymes and DNA ligases were used to respectively cut and paste DNA segments into new genetic sequences (recombinant DNA) by the early 1970s.
> 
> Gene therapy – essentially what Yael and Fischer are discussing – did not become a reality until the 1980s and was not successful until the 1990s. It is still a tricky field, and I am no expert! For the purposes of this fic, this chapter is probably the last point at which there’s a vague attempt to ground the plot in realism. I’m making it up entirely from here on in…
> 
> The Helsinki Declaration, produced by the World Medical Association in 1964, laid down ethical principles for research on human subjects.
> 
> Soviet research into genetics had been curtailed by the rise of Lysenkoism, supported by Stalin, in the 1930s to 1950s. Lysenko rejected Mendelian inheritance and Darwinian evolutionary theory and embraced Lamarckian heritability of acquired characteristics. This caused the USSR to fall behind the West in neurophysiology, cell biology and other biological disciplines. Lysenkoism had generally fallen into disrepute in the USSR by the early 1960s, so it is plausible that the authorities were trying hard to catch up with the West.


	6. Le Cinquième Arrondissement

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Surveillance duty gives the team reflection time...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oof, this chapter was a _nightmare_ to write. It was originally way longer, which means chapter 7 is at least mostly written. On the other hand, this means my little one-shot now looks like it'll be 9 chapters long - help!

**Paris - Le Cinquième Arrondissement**

Solo rolls his shoulders, trying to ease out the crick in his neck. This is what happens when he’s forced to spend four hours stuck in the back of a small van, taking notes of conversations through tinny headphones.

Surveillance is one of his least favourite parts of his job; it requires a discipline and patience that he doesn’t possess. Only pedants and masochists could possibly enjoy it – Peril is in his element, of course.

Luckily, his little performance with Yael at the Institut fundraiser means that Gaby and Illya are taking the lion’s share of the work. They’ve been installed as a couple renting the apartment directly above the scientist’s and are in charge of monitoring him whenever he’s outside the laboratory.

Meanwhile, he and Yael are taking it in turns to monitor the laboratory bugs and chase up research on the rest of Fischer’s lab team. The job is made more tedious by the technical nature of Fischer’s daily conversation in the lab. Yael’s background helps her somewhat, but she’s also struggling.

_“It is beyond my expertise,” she’d reported. “Fischer is definitely attempting to induce physical changes in species by introducing foreign DNA into cells, but how? And to what end? I have no idea.”_

_She’d explained to the team the basics of genetic research. “But this is far beyond anything I’ve read in a science journal.”_

_“Is it possible?” Waverly has asked._

_She’d shrugged. “All things are possible. Fischer’s research in the war focused on the body’s response to extreme heat, extreme cold, thirst, starvation. He wanted to understand the limits of the human condition. But that was twenty years ago. Who knows what he hopes to accomplish now?”_

_“The Nazi version of Captain America?” he’d suggested, but no-one had laughed._

_“Or the perfection of the Aryan ideal.” Waverly had mused. “A genetically perfected Master Race.”_

All very interesting, in a terrifying sort of way, but not strictly helpful. Their original assignment was to use Fischer as bait to identify members of THRUSH high-level command. What they really need to learn is how he’s contacting them and when he’s planning to jump ship. The threat of genetically-modified super-Nazis is frankly a bit of a nuisance. And still unproven. For all they actually know, Fischer could be trying to create glow-in-the-dark cats.

Which brings him to the other frustrating part of the operation – the complete lack of useful information they’ve turned up so far. When he and Peril had first bugged the scientist’s apartment, they’d located two intriguing letters written in a cipher and he’d hoped they were off and running. But Waverly’s cryptographers haven’t yet been able to crack the code, so the existence or otherwise of fluorescent felines is still unknown.

There’s a light staccato tapping on the van door. He checks his watch – Fischer’s working day is almost done and his Russian escort has arrived. Solo reaches over to unlatch the back and Peril clambers in. The KGB have come over all obliging and are officially allowing the team to continue tailing the scientist, but _un_ officially, Solo suspects they’ve ordered their favourite big, blond retriever to abduct Fischer and bundle him behind the Curtain at some convenient juncture.

With both men inside the van, the lack of space is barely tolerable, but they don’t have to cope with it for long. Fischer is a man of habit and exactly ten minutes later he pronounces his work done for the day. Peril slides out to shadow the scientist home.

About an hour later, the last of Fischer’s team also leaves, and Solo is released from his mobile, metallic prison. He parks it a few streets away, does his best to uncrumple his suit and sets off into town. The work may be deadly dull, but it provides him with a reasonable schedule. Yael has made it perfectly clear that she would prefer to be _anywhere_ but in the same room as him, so once the lab rats leave and he delivers his daily report to Waverly, he is free to roam one of his favourite cities.

The past two nights have been spent making the rounds of his usual suspects, an assortment of thieves, fences, forgers and general ne’er-do-wells in equally diverse settings from elegant hotels near the Champs-Élysées to discreet establishments run by formidable women in Pigalle.

This evening, however, is spent getting intimately acquainted with a lovely and (as it transpires) very _open-minded_ pair of Italian art students he runs into at the Musée Rodin. Their apartment is barely larger than the surveillance van, but for the next few hours no-one seems to mind.

It is something of a relief to slip into his customary smooth persona. He doesn’t often meet people he can’t easily manipulate, and encountering Yael so soon after Gaby was…unsettling. The two students do their best to soothe his ruffled feathers, but in the wee small hours they’re fast asleep and he’s still out of sorts.

One nagging concern is his failure to work out what makes Yael tick. He doesn’t like unsolved puzzles and the woman is definitely hiding something. While he doesn’t have a definite answer, he’s beginning to suspect she’s in love with Peril. She’s on edge and watchful around Gaby and when she’s in the same room as Illya, she occasionally stares at him with a strangely sad look, as if she’s searching for something that isn’t there.

If so, the Israeli is out of luck – asking his two partners to spend all night keeping watch over a snoring, middle-aged ex-Nazi gives them plenty of scope to work out their obvious chemistry. He imagines they are finding ways to keep themselves amused.

He shifts into a more comfortable position in the small bed. This is the other pebble in his metaphorical shoe. Although he would never confess to it, he’s feeling slightly left out. Not in the sense of their activities, exactly (though the idea certainly has an appeal), but out of their partnership. They’d worked as a trio for almost a year, and he’d rather got used to having them around.

Admitting that is almost anathema. He’d worked alone his whole career – with local connections, CIA back up or some occasional hired help, sure – but never as part of a real team. Partners got you captured, killed, or tortured by their sadistic Nazi uncle.

And of all the partners out there, he certainly wouldn’t have chosen an angry little German mechanic or an even angrier big Russian soldier. Well, he might have chosen Gaby; he would _never_ have chosen Peril. The man was like a weed; always turning up uninvited and growing on you no matter how much you tried to get rid of it.

Fair’s fair, Peril’s more intelligent than he looks – you can’t win a chess game against him for love nor money, he’s no hardship on the eyes, and there are glimpses of a sense of humour in there. And if you’re twisting his arm, he’ll admit that the Russian is effective in the field. In the same way that heavy artillery is effective.

None of which explains the jolt of genuine pleasure he’d felt at seeing Peril in the hotel suite. Bickering with the Russian again had been deeply satisfying – a steady rhythm section to the light melody he and Gaby have been singing for the past few months. But now Illya and Gaby are making music of their own, and it’s a duet. He can’t help feeling surplus to requirements. The team has no sooner got back together than he’s been left out in the cold.

One of the Italians shifts in her sleep, snuggling into his side. The other one is spark out, sprawled across his chest. Perhaps “out in the cold” is a little over-dramatic.

It’s not as if he envies their predicament. It’s dangerous to get in too deep with people in this business. Gaby may have let him get tortured back in Rome, but Illya had felt her betrayal far more. He’ll concede that he’s attached to them both, but he can still walk away whenever he likes. He just doesn’t want to, not yet.

Dawn is sloshing pink light over the rooftops of Paris, and now both girls are stirring and stretching. He’s still got a few hours before he’s due at the Institut, and there are a number of possibilities that he and his companions have yet to explore. Perhaps a couple of weeks of boring surveillance are exactly what the team needs. He should stop complaining.

* * *

 

Gaby’s not complaining, exactly, but living in a romantic apartment in Paris with an extremely attractive Russian spy is not turning out as she expected.

It’s been three days since they were passed the keys to the apartment, and since then her only company has been business-Illya. The Illya who doesn’t drink, doesn’t talk much and who definitely doesn’t slack off surveillance to engage in non-mission-relevant activities.

She’d settle for eye-contact at this point. The fact of the matter is, she and Illya have spent very little time alone together since that night in London. She has no idea, really, how he feels about her. He’s attracted to her, yes. He cares for her, apparently so. But is there any more to it than that? What does he want from this – what future does he imagine? He’s hardly the type to want to settle down and produce enormous, blond Russian children.

Or is he? In many ways, she doesn’t know him that well. It’s a moot point in any event – his employers are not going to let him swan off into the sunset with an East German defector turned British spy.

She bites down on that treacherous little thought. The image of Illya and her on a beach somewhere, no bugs, no trackers, no mission. Or a little house on the cliffs, fish from the local market, a vegetable patch, a child.

It’s a pleasant daydream, but like most dreams, you wouldn’t want it to come true. She’s no-one’s housewife and she’s certainly not a mother; she’s even less equipped to play happy families than Illya. At least he had a decade or so of actual family life under his belt, a memory of loving parents. Walter had done his best, but she had been damaged goods long before he showed up.

So what _does_ she want from Illya? It’s easier to think about it when he’s not in the apartment, like now. She’s meant to be napping in the afternoons before she starts the evening shift, but she can’t sleep. Illya went out an hour ago, either to brief his KGB handler or to put his body through its paces.

That body is one of the reasons it’s easier to think about things when he’s not around. Solo teases him about his lack of charm but frankly, if Illya ever needed to run a seduction mission he’d never have to say a word; taking his shirt off would do the trick.

She keeps catching herself staring. He’d pulled off his sweater after carrying the last of their boxes up the stairs the other day, the thin undershirt moulded to his arms and back from the effort. If he’d looked round, he’d have seen her practically drooling but he’d simply slipped on a fresh shirt and started unpacking. Clearly he doesn’t want to go there with her right now.

It’s probably for the best. She’s meant to be proving that she’s an experienced agent. She doesn’t want to explain to her boss that they lost their mark because she couldn’t keep her hands off her partner.

She fidgets in the large bed. The nature of the assignment means they’re never asleep at the same time, so it’s all hers. She’s drowning in it.

It would be easier if her attraction was purely physical, but it’s more complicated than that. Or perhaps it’s very simple. Too simple for her to admit to herself. There’s a whole world of danger wrapped up in “simple”.

He’s hardly an obvious contender for the title of “desirable boyfriend”, anyway. Damaged, volatile, violent – she’s gone through all of this with him before. But she needs some rough edges. She’s got enough of her own and she knows from experience that they tend to rip nice boys to shreds. On the other hand, he’s no mindless thug – she’s dated a few of those too.

That is Illya’s paradox. She’s not sure how, but the Communists have managed to produce a lethal killing machine with an endlessly affectionate heart. God knows how Illya holds on to that heart. In the past year, she’s learned that no-one in the espionage game survives long without losing a certain element of humanity, and being the KGB’s favourite pet means he must have had to do more morally dubious deeds than most. Perhaps his rage protects him somehow, allows him to disassociate from the work. What does she know – she’s no psychiatrist.

She hears the front door close quietly. The lethal killing machine is tip-toeing around the entrance hall, trying not to wake her up. Is that comical or deeply tragic? Unable to resist, she creeps to the bedroom door. Illya pads into the living room, drenched in sweat.

It’s unusual to get a chance to watch him without him knowing about it, and her face softens as she watches him wander in and out, stretching out his shoulders and gulping water. He disappears into the second bathroom and reappears with a towel.

Then he starts methodically stripping down, peeling off each soaking layer with evident relish. As he cools down, she’s inexorably heating up. This is precisely what she doesn’t need. He wraps a towel round his waist, gathers the heap of sweaty clothes and as he straightens up, looks directly at her.

There’s a long moment where neither of them moves. She sees his expression migrate through surprise and irritation before he settles on embarrassment. She has no idea why – she’s the one in pyjamas, hair mussed, with what can only be an openly lustful look on her face.

“I did not mean to wake you.”

“You didn’t.”

There’s an awkward pause.

“I see you took my advice – the tan line is gone.”

He looks down at himself, blushes deeper, mutters something about _free time_ , and clutching his sweaty bundle of clothes to him like a shield, starts to back away towards the bathroom.

That does it. She can handle him wishing to be professional while on a mission, but there’s no telling how long this surveillance situation is going to last and she’s damned if she’s going to tiptoe around his code of conduct for weeks on end.

“Illya, what do you think you’re doing?”

He looks nonplussed. “Taking a shower?”

“Not right now. I mean on this mission. Are you planning to ignore me for the duration?”

“I am not ignoring you. I – can we discuss this later?”

“No. We are discussing it now. You’re the one who chose to start stripping off in the living room.”

“I thought you were asleep. Bathroom is very small.”

She waves the semantics aside.

“ _Illya_. If you’re bored of me, if you want to go back to being purely partners again, just tell me. Three days ago, you were whispering some very explicit fantasies in my ear, and now you can barely look me in the eye without your shirt on.”

He sags a little. “I am just trying to keep focus, Gaby. Surveillance is ninety-nine percent hearing nothing. I do not want to miss critical one percent because I am compromised.”

“I’m compromising you?”

“Yes. I mean, no.” He sighs. “Yes. You are a distraction, and I cannot afford to fail. I cannot afford for Oleg to know how I – to suspect I do not perform optimally.”

“They’ll take you away from UNCLE? Because of me?”

“Because of all of it.” He gestures around at the luxury apartment. “They spent a great deal of time training me. They fear defection.”

Her face twists a little, and she fights to stay in control. “So that’s it? We go back to partners?”

His jaw clenches. “I do not know. I need to keep you safe, keep you off their radar.”

“I’m a British spy, Illya – I’m by definition _on_ their radar.” She sounds confident, but the thought is terrifying.

“Not like this.”

“You sound quite experienced in the matter.”

“No. I’ve never –,” he drops the clothes and grasps her shoulders. She can’t bear it when he looks at her like this, imploring her to understand his strange balancing act between loyalty and loathing for his country.

“Gaby, in KGB, this is forbidden. I cannot give them excuse to start paying you more attention. I must stop this weakness –,” he bites that sentence off at her expression. “I cannot afford to make mistakes. Waverly can only help me so far.”

She registers the phrase. “Help you? How? Are you planning to lea-“

He puts a finger to her lips – the only bugs in here are his, but some things are still too dangerous to say out loud.

“There is no leaving. One day, eventually, there may be – retirement. If survive long enough.”

There’s a strange emphasis on the word “retirement”. She slowly replays the earlier statement about Waverly. The enormity of what he’s hinting at sinks in.

It’s a possibility she’d never imagined he would consider, but he’s changed in the last year. The distance between who he is and what his country demands of him has grown. The uncontrollable rages have been fewer and farther between. The KGB have misjudged the strength of their indoctrination.

She can’t take all the credit. Illya talks of Waverly as an ally not a taskmaster, and as for his bond with Napoleon – well they’d both deny it furiously, but arguing with each other is clearly one of their favourite hobbies. They’re good for each other, in a way. Illya unbends a little around Solo, is bullied into enjoying life a bit more. In return, he makes Napoleon care more, lose some of that ingrained cynicism. One’s humour for the other’s heart.

She had wondered whether going back to the KGB would stamp that all out, but the three months away from UNCLE only appear to have widened the cracks in his loyalty. There might be a fairly unpleasant reason for that, of course.

“You can’t have been working on the Fischer case the whole time you were away. What else have they been making you do, Illya?”

His lips press into a thin line. “Cannot say.”

“Can’t, or won’t?”

“Let’s call it both.”

“But it’s becoming harder for you – harder to do their dirty work?”

He looks away.

“I cannot discuss with you, Gaby. I can _never_ discuss with you. Have already said too much.”

She wonders how he plans to force the KGB to accept the retirement of their best agent. If he disables himself, they’ll probably just kill him. If he stays behind the Iron Curtain they’ll either try to torture him back into the field or again, kill him. He knows about too many of their closet skeletons to survive. He’s going to have to run while he’s this side of the Curtain, try to use those skeletons to negotiate a truce in exile. He would never be safe.

Her mind buzzes with questions – _“Did you ever have a game plan, Illya? How did you think this was going to work out?”_ But she knows the answers already. He never thought he was going to live long enough to consider a life after the KGB, so they never had to offer him one.

It occurs to her that he hasn’t asked for any assurances from her, isn’t asking her to come with him when he runs, and she realises that he never will. He’s keeping her safe, keeping her separate from his slow path towards freedom, asking for no guarantees that she’ll be waiting at the end of it.

The rush of emotion that hits her is surprisingly strong, a confusing mess of feelings that she isn’t inclined to examine too deeply. When she finally makes eye contact again, his expression is concerned, compassionate. She’s not sure what he sees, but it seems to satisfy him.

“Не сомневаюсь, мне,” he says, softly.

“Ich vertraue dir.”

The dangerous conversation negotiated, there’s a tangible release of tension in the room. Her eyes flicker to his hands on her shoulders and then up and down his torso, still very much on display.

“Illya, I’ll offer you a compromise. _I_ can’t function working with you like this –“

He starts to back away. “I am sorry. Will put shirt on immediately.”

“Absolutely not. That would be criminal. No, my compromise is this – we maintain irreproachable professional standards while Fischer is on our watch. But during our downtime in the afternoons, we get to know each other a little more. We – may not have this opportunity again for a while.”

He nods slowly, taking her proposal more seriously than she expected.

“Carpe diem?”

She smiles. “Between midday and four pm, you can seize anything you like, Kuryakin.”

His face slowly relaxes into a smile, and she turns on her heel, heading for the bedroom. “But only after you shower.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Glow in the dark cats are actually a thing. Those crazy South Koreans: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14882008
> 
> Не сомневаюсь, мне = don’t doubt me.  
> Ich vertraue dir = I trust you. (Both Google translate, so please let me know if they're off.)


	7. Les égouts de Paris

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gaby and Illya make an unpleasant discovery.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I may have spent this weekend with a vile cold, which has the upside of giving me lots of time to write. So...I'm almost finished! Hurrah! I'll aim to post the last few updates over the next few days. Whew...

**Paris**

Despite the compromise, they lose Fischer three days later.

She knew it was too good to last – three hazy afternoons of abandoned clothes, lazy conversations and lunches in bed. Not that they’re spending much time eating. Illya approaches sex like she’s a new chess opponent, learning all her favourite gambits and working on new strategies to make her lose control. He has the ability to be unbearably gentle and breathtakingly strong by turns; the end result is always the same, finding herself gasping his name incoherently as the world dissolves around her.

He is softer and more vulnerable after these sessions, slowly telling her more about his time at the KGB academy and even snippets from his childhood, his hands tracing her body as he speaks, as if she’s some sort of talisman against the monsters in his past.

In return, she outlines her own, lonely childhood – mother killed in a car accident when she was two, father whisked off to work for the Nazis a few years later. Her father’s older sister had looked after her for a while, dutifully sending her to school and to ballet classes in accordance with Udo’s wishes. But the near starvation conditions in Berlin at the end of the war left a permanent mark on her aunt; she died in the harsh winter of 1946. Uncle Rudi was busy selling his services to anyone who would protect him from Allied justice, and there was no-one else left to care.

Gaby remembers none of this, only a confused period of time where she was always hungry and no-one comforted her. It was her ballet teacher who saved her. Walter told her that Frau Franck had found her in a crowded and dirty emergency foster care facility.

_“I remember when she first brought you home. You were so scared, so thin – half starved – but you were a stubborn little thing. Wouldn’t cry, wouldn’t talk.”_

It had been three weeks before she’d started speaking again; a few words to Frau Franck _(“call me Elise, Süße”)_ but mostly to Walter Schmidt, her much older half-brother, a taciturn, grumpy local mechanic who’d never married and never wanted children.

They made a good match, she and Walter. She’d attached herself to him and refused to be dissuaded, following him round the workshop, playing in puddles of oil and grease. He’d eventually given in and started explaining what he was doing, then letting her have a go – a natural teacher.

Walter’s mother had been an Englishwoman who had engaged in an ill-advised love affair with a well-to-do German businessman at the tail end of the nineteenth century. He’d not met his father until after his mother died. The old man apparently relented after it was clear his wife wasn’t going to give him a son. Elise had benefited from better schools and dance classes but Walter, who had never been academic, had been set to train with the city’s best mechanics and later given an inheritance to start his own garage.

“So this is how you learn such good English,” Illya had mused. “He sounds a good man.”

“He was.”

Walter died of cancer in 1959. Elise had escaped to West Germany with a new husband some years before, but Gaby hadn’t wanted to leave him. Even then she could have escaped, but she’d been twenty-one, grief-stricken and overwhelmed by the sudden inheritance of a garage. By the time she’d got herself together, she was trapped.

The edited version of all this? Everybody leaves her, eventually.

Oddly enough, ‘everybody’ apparently includes Fischer, who abruptly disappears on her watch.

It’s Sunday, so there was inevitably going to be some disruption to the routine. She’d volunteered to tail him as Illya had been patiently monitoring his sleep since 2am. Fischer had been up early and she’d assumed he was heading to a church service. So far, the scientist had proved a very simple mark. He appeared to be under no fear of surveillance, didn’t check his papers for signs of disturbance and was oblivious to his tails.

This makes it all the more baffling when he disappears off the map about fifteen minutes after setting out.

She frantically radios Illya, who arrives five minutes later in the car with the tracking console. The tracker had come to a halt a few blocks away, but even when they’re directly on top of the signal, there’s no sign of Fischer, the jacket the tracker was in, or of the tracker itself.

It takes Solo, who arrives shortly after, to point out that Paris has a famous sewer system and that the tracker might be _below_ them, and another ten minutes to work out which entrance Fischer had used. A few minutes after that, they discover his entire outfit neatly packed into a polythene bag which is tucked into an alcove in the wall of the sewer.

“He must have had help,” Solo proclaims. “There’s no way that a guy goes from a guileless academic to crack agent overnight. I’ll bet any money that one of those encoded messages includes careful instructions on how to lose a tail.”

With no tracker, there’s nothing the team can do but wait.

Eight hours later, when Gaby’s all but convinced herself that Fischer had made his final defection to THRUSH on her watch, the little scientist bobs back up to the surface, suit back on and tracker intact. Gaby spends an hour trying to repair her bitten nails that evening, and the next day Illya disappears down into the sewers to investigate.

“Is a maze. Impossible to know where he went,” was the report. “But I found the suit he changed into. A full change of clothes, now with tracker attached.”

They don’t even need to wait another week. Two days later, Fischer announces to his lab team that he will be away from the office the next day and it’s a simple matter for Illya, armed with detailed sewer schematics that Waverly conjures out of an unnamed contact, to track the scientist’s subterranean route above ground.

Which is how Gaby comes to be picking her way through a dark tunnel behind Illya’s reassuring bulk. It’s less revolting than she had imagined – a simple walkway alongside a canal of dark, foetid water. There’s the occasional rat, but she’s clean and dry.

Illya mutters something in Russian which she thinks roughly translates as “verdammt.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Should be there. My calculations say we are on top of final position, give or take a few meters. Have we missed door?”

She casts her eyes around, but the wall appears featureless. She runs her fingers along; it isn’t as smooth as the dim light from her torch makes it appear.

“We could be here forever trying to find a hidden entrance.”

Illya hunkers down, examining the floor. By process of elimination, she looks up, training the torch beam on the tunnel roof. She nudges Illya with her leg.

“Illya – what about that?”

He traces the line with his fingers. “Could be trap door. Cannot open without help.”

She goes back to running her fingers along the wall, but there’s no way there could be a button small enough to be completely invisible. They stand there for a few minutes, frustrated. Below them, a rat crawls out from under the lip of the walkway over the sewage. She stares at it while a small part of her brain jumps up and down, trying to get her attention.

“Illya – what did you say was in Fischer’s sewer suit?”

“Not much – Some pens, a handkerchief. Also walking stick, with crook. Perhaps to help him in the dark?”

“He doesn’t walk with a limp, and he’s not old enough to need that much help.” She lies down on the walkway, trying not to breathe deeply. She steels herself then slides her hand under the lip, centimetres from the dark water. She feels about for about twenty seconds until her fingers find the edge of a casing. A moment later, a button depresses and the trapdoor clanks open, complete with a little ladder. Illya is tall enough to reach up and pull it down.

“Nice work, chop shop.”

“Please tell me you brought a rag or something to clean my hand with.”

He smiles sympathetically and hands one over before disappearing up the ladder.

She waits a few moments, and sees light flood the aperture. “Illya, is the place clear?”

There’s only silence from the top.

“Illya?”

She draws her gun, and carefully climbs up one-handed. She exits into a larger space than she expected, brilliantly lit up with bright white lighting. There are lab coats and plastic overshoes on hooks to her right, and the place has a sharp, clinical smell. It’s a stark change to the tunnel behind her.

She can’t see much of the interior though, because Illya has come to a stop directly in front of her, one hand still on the light switch. She dusts herself off and comes to check on him, more concerned with his lack of movement than with the rest of the lab.

His expression is familiar, although she’s not seen it as much lately. The last time she saw him like this was in Istanbul, when they’d uncovered the criminal organisation with a side line in selling young girls to wealthy sadists.

“You should not be here,” he says, looking straight over her head. She turns, slowly, as her heart starts beating a warning.

* * *

 

Illya writes the report of the excursion, and kindly leaves out the part where she threw up into the sewer. She’d had presence of mind enough to get down the ladder, the smell of the sewage a preferable alternative to the horrifying mixture of laboratory chemicals, blood and death that her brain had finally registered.

He’d held it together throughout their time underground but had reduced most of their apartment’s second bedroom to splinters before sitting down to write the report.

Her shock must be lingering on her face, because Solo looks genuinely concerned when they show up for the meeting with the report and the carefully developed photographs. Apart from the experiments, they’d found a pile of research, partly written in formulae and medical diagrams, partly in that strange cipher that the experts in British Intelligence were still struggling to crack.

Waverly’s face is grave as he studies the report.

“We’ll have to ask Miss Dayan for help with these diagrams,” he says. Yael is still on duty monitoring Fischer in his acceptable guise of Müller, and Gaby is relieved that she has missed this graphic chapter in their investigation.

“But from these… _abominations_ , I think we can conclude that whatever Fischer is trying to achieve, he has not succeeded yet.” He sighs. “Kuryakin, I hate to ask this of you, but until Fischer makes his move, I will need you to continue to visit the laboratory at regular intervals.”

Illya nods, the only sign of his discomfort a solitary finger tapping against his leg.

“I can help,” Napoleon offers, shrugging eloquently at Illya’s raised eyebrows. “I helped liberate Dachau in the war. I’m no stranger to this.”

“Me too,” she hears herself volunteer.

All the men turn to look at her, and she wonders why she said it. The thought of going back into that lab makes her skin crawl.

“Miss Teller – you understand that no matter _what_ you find, you cannot interfere,” Waverly says gently. “You cannot _help_.”

She prefers to change the subject. “He can’t be running these experiments alone. Solo – have you or Yael found anything suspicious on the team at the Institut?”

“No, and that’s a good point. If there _are_ others working down there, you and Peril got awfully lucky that you visited when the coast was clear. How do we know when it’s safe for us to go back? Did you leave behind bugs?”

Illya shakes his head. “Too deep – ok for tracker, not voice transmission.”

The four of them fall into a troubled silence.

It’s broken by the harsh ring of the phone. Waverly gets to it first.

“Agent?”

Pieces of Yael’s update float across the room.

“…announcement…Geneva…Darlan and Darnand…”

Waverly listens intently before hanging up.

“Some good news, I think. Fischer has announced last-minute plans to go to Geneva on Friday for a conference he’s just decided to attend. Solo – take point getting details of the location and organising body from Fischer’s secretary please. He’s also taking two of his research assistants with him – Illya, Gaby, dig up everything you can on them. If possible, I want their apartments searched before the end of the day. Gaby – get back in time to pick up Fischer from Yael’s oversight when he leaves. Everyone except Gaby will report back here at 2200. This could be it.”

The next thirty-six hours pass in a blur of activity, which has the blessed consequence of keeping her from dwelling on the contents of the sewer laboratory. It’s not until she’s packed onto a plane headed for Geneva that she falls asleep, too exhausted to do anything but fall into black oblivion, Illya’s reassuring bulk against her side.

When the nightmares eventually do come, she comforts herself by imagining, in detail, what she’s going to do when she finally catches up with Fischer. Revenge fantasy is even better than vodka – she sleeps soundly through the rest of the flight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Süße = “sweetie”


	8. Geneva

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team go after Fischer in Geneva, but things don't go quite according to plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Almost there - the final two chapters will go up tomorrow!

**Geneva**

Geneva is meant to be a beautiful city. It certainly looked like it on the plane’s approach, the deep blue waters of the lake reflecting the dramatic mountains that surround it. But they’ve not seen much scenery since they landed. This is typical, of course – Illya can describe with great accuracy the industrial districts and backstreets of a range of world cities, and now he can add Geneva to the list.

He closes his eyes and briefly allows himself to imagine a day boating on the lake, a picnic in the hills, sightseeing like any other tourist with Gaby on his arm. It’s an impossible dream – he’ll be an agent or a fugitive all his life.

It’s only recently that this certainty has started troubling him. Waverly had spotted it first and had quietly taken him aside. The spymaster had done most of the talking, never asking questions, merely stating theories. His silence had been enough. Since then, there have been a few oblique conversations, some assurances, a name or two. Nothing too definite, nothing too dangerous.

His job now is to allay Oleg’s concerns. He’s not sure how successful that’s been. There’s little to smile about in Moscow, not much call for levity. He’s been obedient to a fault. Nevertheless, his psychiatrist – his _minder_ – had made some comments that suggested he’d been uncharacteristically stable while he was back.

At least he doesn’t have any of the normal tells of a potential defection risk – there’s nothing to say goodbye to, no little rituals, no final indignity to break the camel’s back. He’d returned to the KGB willingly when they’d called. They’d spent a lot of time asking about the UNCLE dynamic and they aren’t too happy about the way Waverly runs his team, but he thinks he’s been able to summon enough genuine disdain for Solo’s cavalier style to convince them he hasn’t been seduced by the West.

They don’t see the danger in Gaby. Why should they? He’s never looked twice at a woman during a mission before, and his size and brooding silences have usually deterred any woman from looking at him. No doubt they think their relationship is exactly the same as his working partnership with Yael – cool, professional, uninterested.

It’s not a style that works for everyone, of course. He listens to his partner shift beside him, counting the pattern of the guards touring the perimeter of the bleak, charmless building near the water’s edge. He enjoyed watching the smooth American fail to charm Yael in Paris.

_“Why does she bother you so much, Cowboy? Not everyone has to like you.”_

_“I don’t see why not. In any event, not everyone likes me. You don’t like me, for one.”_

_“I am special case.”_

_“I just think she’s hiding something. Don’t you see it?”_

_He’d shrugged. “She is spy – spies hide things.”_

_“Not true, Peril. You’re an open book.”_

_“Perhaps she is just doing job, Cowboy.”_

_“No-one in this business is just doing their job.”_

Solo has a good point, but Illya can’t bring himself to care. He’s more interested in watching his partner get wound up by it.

Solo nudges him. “Dozing off there, Peril?”

“You are lookout, not me, Cowboy.”

“Well look sharp – I think I’ve spotted our opening.”

He levers himself into a low crouch and starts clearing his mind for action, a familiar routine which he has had to adapt since he started working with the American.

“Not this again.” Solo rolls his eyes. “We don’t have time for you to put your angry face on.”

“You should not go into place this heavily guarded without being focused.”

“We’re not even meant to be engaging with the guards at this point – just incapacitating two to get uniforms.”

“Nevertheless, is dangerous to attack with mind on other things.”

He pauses. If he’s practising what he preaches, he needs to say this now to get his mind off it.

“On this note – thank you, Cowboy.”

Solo raises an eyebrow.

“For what?”

“For looking after her while I was gone. For keeping her safe. And for – being gentleman.”

Solo smiles his infuriating smile. “Peril, I’m _never_ a gentleman. Our little Gaby could have joined me for some after-hours fun any time she wanted to while you were away. My door is always open, my bed is always warm. You both know that. But she chose not to – make of that what you will. _I_ think she simply has terrible taste in men.”

His face must have remained confused, because Solo grasps his shoulder, his expression sidling very close to sincerity.

“She’s in love with you, Illya, god help you both. Stop worrying about it. Please. Because it’s extremely distracting for _my_ focus, particularly when we’re highly likely to get shot at.”

Solo turns back to the entrance, watching the guards slowly perambulate across. He counts quietly under his breath, then mutters his now-customary catchphrase.

“Come on, Peril. I’ll let you tag along.”

Getting into the building turns out to be relatively simple. It’s a large complex, nominally owned by a subsidiary of a pharmaceutical company. Fischer had made a perfunctory appearance at a vaguely relevant academic gathering and then made a beeline for the place. His two assistants hadn’t even bothered with the conference.

That was twelve hours ago. His instructions were simple – on the UNCLE side, he was to photograph as many important people and documents in the building as he could. Oleg’s orders had been even simpler – come back with as much research as possible, ideally with the scientist too.

He’s not quite sure how he’s going to square that circle. Even though Solo seems to have stopped caring whether the CIA get their money’s worth from UNCLE, Waverly is very worried that they could yank him back into prison if he doesn’t deliver. And letting the KGB make off with a CIA asset – even one who is in the process of defecting to a global criminal organisation – isn’t going to please them.

It’s one of the things weighing on his mind as they creep through the corridors, the ill-fitting stolen uniform tugging at his shoulders.

_“Just pick one, Peril. This is wasting time.”_

_“All guards so far are too small. Am simply waiting for one tall enough. I cannot make myself smaller for mission.”_

_“And it’s a crying shame you can’t. I can barely breathe in this cupboard, you Russian ogre. Stop digging your elbow into my kidney.”_

His sense of unease grows as they work their way into the heart of the building. It’s all too quiet, too easy. Solo breaks them into an office and they spend a productive few minutes taking pictures of personnel files and interesting correspondence. As they work their way down to the basement, the corridors start to get busier. There are more lab coats here, more worried faces.

Solo pulls them into a doorway as two men walk past, talking rapidly in German.

“The penultimate one just died on the table. None of them are taking to the treatment.”

“What does Fischer say?”

“He’s saying they’re not strong enough – their immune systems can’t take the strain. He says he got closer than this in Paris.”

“Vega can’t be pleased.”

The two men disappear around the corner. He shares a meaningful look with Solo and they set off in the same direction.

This turns out to be a mistake, and for all his misgivings, it really is pure bad luck. Solo just happens to bump into a buddy of the man whose coat and pass he’s stolen.

For the first few minutes, he thinks they’re going to be able to batter their way out of the situation, even when they exhaust their small store of ammunition. He and Cowboy have faced worse odds. But then Solo takes a blow to the head and goes down, and Illya sees red.

He is standing over Solo’s prone form, a circle of fallen guards around him, when they rush him again – this time in enough numbers to wrestle him down and plunge a needle in his arm. His world slowly disintegrates, the red fading to black.

_Gaby…_

* * *

 

Gaby fidgets in the getaway car. She’s a bundle of nerves, unlike the ice sculpture in the passenger seat. Yael is as cool as ever, staring steadily out the windscreen.

It’s the first time the two of them have been alone together since Yael’s breakdown in Paris. She wonders if the Israeli has also clocked this. After that little episode, that sudden insight into the currents under Yael’s calm surface, their interactions have been purely professional. Too professional. Yael had resumed her reserved, neutral persona around the team, perhaps tending to irritation towards Solo and – _something_ around her. She’s never rude, exactly, but Gaby can’t shake the distinct impression that Yael would rather she wasn’t part of the team.

That’s exactly the atmosphere in the car now. If anything, it’s even more pronounced. Yael has said nothing for fifteen minutes, staring straight ahead and radiating unwillingness to talk. Gaby drums her fingers on the steering wheel, tense with worry and rigid with boredom. She’s had lots of practice with uncommunicative agents, she’ll be damned if she’ll let Yael leave her stewing in silence while her partners hunt down an evil genius.

“Why don’t you like me?”

That should do it. Yael’s fingers twitch, and though her face stays calm there’s a tiny tick which suggests her jaw has clenched.

“Why do you say that?” she counters.

“Please. You barely speak to me – even now, trying to get more than two words out of you is like pulling teeth.”

The Israeli smiles. “I barely say two words to _anyone_.”

Gaby is undeterred. “And every time we’re in the same room, it feels like you’re deliberately keeping as far away from me as possible.”

Yael frowns slightly and Gaby guesses she’s irritated that she’s been so transparent. She presses home her advantage.

“So, why don’t you like me? Is it because you think I’m not up to scratch compared to all the other crack female agents? Because – if you haven’t noticed – there aren’t that many of us out in the field. I thought you might be more welcoming, help me try and get a bit more respect. But here we are, stuck on back-up duty while the men go off to get shot at.”

Yael exhales slowly, and finally looks across at her.

“You think I don’t like working with you?”

“I think you think I’m inexperienced, and fine, so I can’t kill five men with my little finger or climb a sheer wall – I’m a better driver than any agent I’ve come across, a better marksman than most – and a better mechanical engineer too, I bet.”

The other woman actually laughs a little, which only makes her angrier.

“And if you think I’m a liability, well we’ve been working together for almost two weeks now. You could have offered to teach me some more technique. I’d – I’d love to be able to fight like you.”

“You do not need my help, Miss Teller. You’re learning very quickly on your own. I think you’re an extremely able agent.”

The admission takes all the wind out of her sails. Embarrassment blooms hotly down her neck.

“Oh. Well. You don’t act like it.”

“I don’t – I don’t have that easy facility with others that you and Agent Solo do. I apologise for giving the wrong impression.”

The car is silent for a while as Gaby wrestles her own insecurities back into their box.

“Would – would you like some advice on combat, though?”

Yael is looking at her own hands, and on anyone else Gaby would have called it – it’s almost – _shy_.

“Go on then. Please.”

“You are a dancer, yes?”

“I was, once.”

“It’s evident. When you tripped the two CIA tails in Paris – that was you thinking like a dancer. Do that more.”

“Yes, but what happens when someone is trying to fight me? Like in Bayreuth – you were so much faster than me – I couldn’t dance with you then.”

Yael shrugs. “Move faster. _Think_ faster. Dance better.”

“Helpful.” she says, in a tone that says precisely the opposite.

“It’s also practice. What did your dance teacher tell you – all your problems in ballet can be solved at the barre, yes? After Bayreuth, did you spend time sparring on the mats?”

“Yes – I was covered in bruises for a week.”

“Good. That is the only way. You will never be as good as me.” She catches Gaby’s slight intake of breath. “It’s true. I will never drive like you, will never fix engines like you. You will never be as fast as me. It’s a lifetime of work. But you will be better than most, the more you practice.”

Gaby concedes the point.

“But what do I do when I come up against someone better than me?”

“That’s what separates the good agents from the best agents, Teller. Finding a way to turn the situation back to your advantage when the cards are stacked against you.”

Yael thinks for a moment, and then continues. “Also, it is not everything – to be the best fighter. Solo is an excellent agent, but Illya or I could easily kill him in combat. And yet there he is, still alive. You said before you have your own strengths. Well then, that is enough. We – women – need to be better than the average male agent to get our chance, true. But we cannot be perfect, however much they ask it of us. All agents have weaknesses, all have strengths. Know yours.”

“What’s your weakness?”

She asks it without thinking and regrets it immediately. Yael gives her a cool, metallic stare and slowly looks away.

“Sorry. That’s – it’s not my business.”

“That’s your job to try and find out, Agent Teller. And mine to try and hide. That’s what your Agent Solo would tell you, anyway.”

Yael checks her watch.

“Something’s wrong. They should have checked in by now.”

She checks the tracking consoles. Illya and Solo’s dots are still bleeping away, their position stationary. Gaby’s stomach clenches. She’d been so wrapped up in Yael’s evaluation that she’d momentarily forgotten that Illya and Napoleon were in danger.

Yael radios in to Waverly. “Nothing yet. It is ten minutes past the expected check in. Next move?”

The radio crackles, then Waverly’s perfect English accent cuts through, sounding as concerned as she’s ever known him.

“I think it’s time for Plan B, agents. I should tell you this is the first time that I’m aware of that an intelligence agency is sending in a solely female rescue team. No pressure, agents, but do me proud.”

Gaby hopes her voice sounds calmer than she feels.

“Understood. We expect it will take us half an hour to infiltrate, then another thirty minutes to determine the situation and check in.”

“I expect to hear from you in sixty minutes, agent. Please be advised, there is no other back-up. The Swiss get a bit twitchy about these sorts of operations – my hands are somewhat tied.”

Waverly won’t say it over the radio, but she knows that he will have been fielding angry phone calls from both the Americans and the Russians. The CIA had let Fischer head to Switzerland to what sounded like a perfectly legitimate conference, and were red-faced to discover he’d slipped his leash. They’d been even less pleased to find out that one of their agents had known about this possibility for over a week and had done nothing to warn them.

The Russians, meanwhile, were set on getting their hands on Fischer, and would much rather that Illya had intercepted him before he disappeared into a heavily guarded building. If she and Yael fail, the KGB are not going to take kindly to the loss of a prospective asset _and_ their best agent. Waverly has pokers in various fires. They can make his life difficult in many, many ways.

There’s a momentary pause while she runs through all of this in her head.

“Understood, sir. Over and out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m afraid I haven’t checked Waverly’s assertion about the all-female rescue team, so apologies to any history experts who can prove me wrong! I know there have been lots of notable female covert operatives, particularly in the SOE and OSS in World War II (e.g. Virginia Hall, Nancy Wake, Christine Granville, Pearl Witherington, Violette Szabo to name a few), but I’m not sure if they ever operated just with other women.
> 
> However, for a great (fictional) story about all-female spy teams, I’d recommend Ken Follett’s book “Jackdaws”. From memory, I think it finishes with a character using Witherington’s wonderful quote when, as women were ineligible for military honours, she was offered the civil equivalent: “There was nothing civil about what I did.”


	9. Gefangen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gaby and Yael attempt a daring rescue...

**Geneva**

Solo comes around slowly. He appears to be in a medical facility, and for a moment he thinks they’ve already been rescued until he tries to move his hands and comes up against a restraint.

He’s efficiently tied to a medical trolley but is free to move his head. Not that it’s fun to do so, as whoever rendered him unconscious has given him a splitting headache.

No-one appears to be paying him much attention. There are two armed guards by the door and five lab assistants scurrying around another medical bed in the middle of the room. In the corner is an enormous computer whirring away with another lab rat feverishly reading through whatever results it’s spitting out on a monitor.

He isn’t quite sure why he’s won the lottery of being the second guinea pig in what looks like an unpleasant experiment, but Illya’s laid out on the central table with an intravenous drip in his arm.

“We started with the prime physical specimen,” states Fischer to a man Solo recognises vaguely as one of the THRUSH representatives from the personnel files. “We are hopeful that he will be the most likely to survive the initial treatment.”

He isn’t sure whether to feel offended or relieved. Illya is stripped to the waist, completely unconscious. As the two men bickering in German continue to show no interest in him, their responsive captive, he is free to evaluate the _prime physical specimen_ for himself.

Illya seems mostly unharmed, with no visible head wounds and no new injuries to add to the patchwork of scars across his upper half. Solo stops feeling offended. He keeps fit, as is required of any active agent who wants to avoid becoming terminally _in_ active. But his nature is not ascetic, and there have been too many fine Cuban cigars and single malts to let him seriously compete with Illya’s physique.

His eyes drift down Illya’s body, until he realises he’s attracted the attention of one of the lab rats. Suddenly aware of how prurient his gaze has been, he gives the man a charming wink and a smile. The man hurries over and whispers in Fischer’s ear.

The little scientist turns towards him, surveys his body with an utterly clinical eye, shrugs and turns back to his conversation. Solo is clearly superfluous to requirements for now.

“I have been close for a while, but progress in the THRUSH lab has been necessarily slow. Subterfuge is not a friend of research. The French and the Americans –”, Fischer contemptuously flicks a hand, “– they will not let me use human subjects. _Ethics._ Has there ever been more of a brake on human endeavour than the concept of _ethics_?”

Solo can’t stop himself from rolling his eyes. The man appears to have studied Nazi Villainy 101. Say what you like about Victoria Vinciguerra, but the woman had _style_.

The THRUSH overseer appears to share his opinion.

“Get _on_ with it, Fischer,” the man says in accented German. “These monologues are of no consequence unless you can prove this treatment of yours works. You’re lucky you have two more subjects to work with. I want to see results in the next few hours or I will evacuate your team along with the entire facility. You were meant to arrive from Paris _clean_ , not with two UNCLE operatives on your tail.”

Fischer waves away the complaint.

“Patience, Vega. We have yet to see whether our subject takes to his genetic medicine. Your superiors were very clear – they want to see improvements in healing which are innate, not reliant on a medical intervention. _Able to walk away from multiple gunshot wounds,_ if I recall accurately. This is a big challenge. It was simply not possible in the 1940s. We knew far less about the genetic code then. Now, I have great hopes of inducing a change in the subject’s very makeup – to rewrite the instructions in the cells.”

The THRUSH representative – Vega – looks unconvinced. Illya is still out cold, showing no sign of sudden genetic advances as god knows what is pumped into his arm.

Napoleon shares the THRUSH honcho’s scepticism. Fischer is talking about science fiction. From Yael’s briefing, Watson and Crick only established the structure of DNA a decade ago. To be able to manipulate it with a simple chemical intravenous solution, and manipulate it with a known and beneficial outcome – well, if Fischer is correct, he would be receiving the Nobel Prize for Physiology for the next twenty years.

Fischer fusses around the big Russian, checking vitals and so forth. Solo scans the room again for escape routes, evidence, anything helpful.

Based on the pictures that Gaby and Peril brought back from the Paris sewer-lab, the options here are; Illya responding badly to the concoction they’re feeding into him and dying on the table; making it through but then being tortured in the name of science and bleeding out everywhere; or – or coming out the end as some sort of genetically enhanced super soldier. As if he needed any encouragement to be more bloody-minded.

But assuming the more likely scenario that the little scientist has teetered off genius and into full-blown madness, then it looks like options one or two are most likely and that is upsetting for at least two reasons. Firstly, he’s actually rather fond of Peril and would prefer not to see him die, and secondly there’s every indication that it will mean he ends up as the next guinea pig on the madman’s block.

His eyes finally find a clock, and he squints slightly to see the time. It’s forty minutes after they were due to check in. He wriggles his left toe and feels the small tracker still in place in his boot. One of the machines around Illya bleeps and two lab rats rush to check it, their faces worried.

_Hang on, Peril. Gaby’s on her way._

At least, he damn well hopes she is.

* * *

 

They crawl through the heating ducts in silence, penetrating deep into the labyrinthine building. She lives in fear of the tiny flashing dot of Solo’s tracker cutting off before they hit dead centre. They’re making pretty steady progress, and she’s wondering why Waverly didn’t just use this as Plan A, when they hit a dead end.

She beckons Yael forward, sliding flat so the Israeli can get as close as possible, then whispers, “This is as far as we can go.”

She can feel Yael’s breath on her neck as the Israeli murmurs back, “There’s a vent opening six meters behind us. We’ll need to drop through there. They shouldn’t be expecting us, but if they took Solo and Kuryakin here, I think this area will be heavily guarded. It’ll get very hot very quickly. Be prepared.”

She’s not sure if it’s Yael’s words or the soft current of her breath, but the hairs on the back of her neck are tingling. Her heart is racing, adrenalin threatening to overwhelm her. This is what she wanted, isn’t it?

She closes her eyes for a moment, imagines herself back in her car. She’s on the start line, waiting for the flag. Her hands are relaxed on the wheel and the gear stick, her toes tapping gently on the clutch. Her heart hums in time with the engine. It’s what she loves.

She opens her eyes. Yael is silently lifting the grate. Later, she’ll tell herself that it was the thought of saving Illya that got her to leap into the unknown, but that’s not entirely true. She’s been thinking of him and Solo all the way through the tunnel, but in _this_ second, in _this_ moment, she’s aware only of Yael’s quiet nod, the rush of certainty it gives her, the flag sweeping down, her foot stamping on the accelerator.

_Go._

In the corridor below, she gets her first view of Yael in action – at least, when she’s not in action against _her_ – and it’s every bit as impressive as her file suggests. The little gymnast seems to be moving twice as fast as everyone else. Her attackers line up for her as she ricochets between them. The choreographer in Gaby’s soul has to pause for a moment to appreciate the artistry.

Yael looks back at her. Her expression is quite clear. It says, “ _This is the dance, and you’re a dancer. So dance!”_

And Gaby does.

It takes them ten minutes to locate the laboratory, another two to clear a path to the door, and three to take control of the lab, disabling the two guards and rendering the lab assistants unconscious.

Both of her partners are here. Solo’s awake and calling out relatively helpful warnings, but Illya’s ominously silent, unconscious on a hospital bed in the middle of the room.

They finish by restraining Fischer and a man in vaguely military dress. She takes Mr Military, who is surprisingly unarmed despite his uniform. As she’s tying him up she notices Yael muttering something in Fischer’s ear. The scientist goes a sickly green, and Gaby finds herself warming to the Israeli.

“His name is Vega,” Solo supplies from his trolley. “But he speaks German.”

“Ja?” she says, and starts asking her captive questions about Illya, slowly tightening the restraints around his wrists so that his fingers start to twitch.

“Agent – interrogate later.” Yael barks. “We need to finish securing the premises.”

Reluctantly, she leaves the man and goes to watch at the lab door. Yael works on freeing Solo and it’s only then that she can check on Illya. In the background, Yael and Solo drag a lab bench across the door as a barricade.

Illya is unconscious but breathing. There’s a large needle in his left arm and sensors stuck across his chest. She shudders and removes them quickly, noting the thick leather restraints around his wrists and ankles and across his legs and chest. Clearly whatever they’re giving him doesn’t keep him this placid forever.

Yael joins her and gets Gaby to translate some of the German labels on the vials near Illya’s drip. They’re not words she recognises, and often she ends up just giving Anglicised versions of the same names. But it seems to make some sense to Yael, and her brow furrows.

“Some of this stuff is highly toxic,” she mutters. Gaby heads back towards Fischer and casually stands on his fingers.

“If I find you have damaged him,” she says quietly, “you will wish we had killed you when we arrived.”

The little man squeaks, then recovers as Yael roots through the medical supplies.

“Don’t touch him! I’m so close – he is doing so well – so stable.” He turns back to her, “Please Fräulein, I’m actually helping him. He will be better than ever, improved in fact. Is he German like you? He is a wonderful specimen. He could be my first true success.”

The mad gleam in his eye sickens her, and she hits him across the face with the barrel of her gun. It’s harder than she intended, and he slumps sideways, blood trickling from his mouth.

“He’s a Communist, Scheißkerl, and he’s good as he is.”

She turns to Yael. “Is there anything we can do to reverse whatever Fischer’s done to him?”

The Israeli shakes her head. “Not here. Maybe if we can get him out. But I’m worried about waking him up right now. He’s been given a strong sedative to keep him unconscious through whatever process this is. His heart rate is elevated – I don’t want to bring him round unless I have to.”

“Ok, we’ll just have to wheel him out. Can we fashion some sort of bulletproof protection for the trolley?”

“On it,” Solo calls. He’s been rooting in in one of the fallen guards’ jackets, pocketing what appear to be film rolls and his personal effects. He switches to stripping off the man’s body armour. Yael starts tapping at the large computer in the corner, setting the machine whirring.

She gives Illya’s hand a squeeze and heads back to the door.

“I don’t want to unduly alarm anyone,” she calls, “but there’s a bunch of large men assembling outside.”

Solo joins her at the door. “Jesus, how many henchmen does this place _have_?”

He turns to Yael, still preoccupied by the computer. “Agent, do you think you could help us out here? Perhaps concoct a little explosive with that science background of yours?”

She doesn’t look round from the computer. “I’m a biologist, agent, not a chemist.”

“Helpful, isn’t she?” he mutters. “Ok, my dear, it looks like you and I will have to improvise. We’ve got some firepower if they break through the door, but ideally we’d like to clear them out of the hallway before they get in.”

Bullets begin to thud against the barricaded door, cracking the reinforced glass.

Solo slides across the floor and starts sorting through various bottles of chemicals. The assault outside falls silent, and Gaby risks another look at the corridor. There’s nothing there to be helpful, nothing except – except a fuse box high on the wall. She dashes across to Illya, covers him with the body armour as best she can and rolls the trolley into the least exposed position.

“Got anything yet?” she asks Solo. “Because I think I can create a diversion.”

“I think this will clear the corridor,” he says, gingerly holding a glass jar with a rag stuffed in the top, “but the fuse is pretty rudimentary. I’m not sure how long it’ll burn for – ten seconds, maybe fifteen?”

Yael pulls a disc from the computer and joins them. “I’ll sweep up the survivors.”

Another round of bullets strike the door, shattering the glass. They spray across the room, thudding into the computer server.

“Well, there goes the research,” Solo remarks. “Now or never – they’ll be through the door any minute.”

There’s a moment of absolute calm as she positions herself for the shot. She takes it, the lab and the corridor goes dark, there’s a flash as Solo lights the rag, shouts as he skids it out into the corridor and then an unpleasant bang. After that is silence, broken only by a keening cry of pain.

She feels Yael slipping past the barricade and a few moments later, the keening cuts off sharply. Gaby suppresses a shudder. Her eyes are adjusting to the dark, and she feels across to check on Solo. He squeezes back reassuringly, and she crawls across to where she left Illya.

There’s a clank and whirr, and some sort of emergency generator powers up a dim light in the lab. Yael reappears.

“All clear for now, but we should get moving.”

A gurgle from the other side of the lab reminds them of their hostages.

A row of bullet holes in the wall indicates all is not well. Fischer is slumped over, red slowly spreading over his white lab coat.

She hauls him back to his sitting position, untying his hands to get a better look at the wound. “No, no, no, Fischer – you are coming with us to explain what you’ve done to my partner.”

She’s so preoccupied with the scientist, that she doesn’t clock Vega inching towards the prone guard next to him. He topples sideways, cheek smacking into the man’s radio call button, and barks an order. Yael’s fastest on the uptake, firing a shot into his shoulder and knocking him away from the receiver.

An ominous ticking starts from the corner of the laboratory.

Solo hauls the man to his feet. “What did you do?”

The man smiles, blood staining his teeth. She realises he’s dying – the damage from Yael’s shot is nothing compared to the dark mess on the front of his uniform.

“You’re not leaving,” he sneers. “Our secrets will be destroyed with you.”

“Excellent. Good to see you’re finally tapping into your inner arch villain, Vega. Now, be a good man and tell us how long we have before this place blows. That’s the normal protocol, isn’t it?”

Vega coughs, spluttering blood across Solo’s face.

“You want – your friend – to come with you?” His eyes slide slowly towards Illya’s body. “Then not – long enough.”

His eyes roll back in his head. Gaby watches, fascinated and horrified, as his body sags in Solo’s grip. A hand clutches at her arm, making her jump.

“Please, take me with you,” Fischer mutters. “Help me.”

She pushes him off roughly.

“I’ve found the wiring,” Yael announces. “But there’s no control panel.”

She’s balanced on the top of the cabinets, staring into the ceiling. There’s a muffled thump from somewhere outside the lab, rocking them all slightly.

“There’s an exit route into the lake not far from here,” Solo adds helpfully. “If this part of the complex survives long enough for us to get to it.”

Her body feels numb, her racing heart suddenly cold. “You should go,” she says, “get Yael out. I’ll stay with Illya.”

“Not a chance,” he says, looking as surprised at himself as she is. “All for one, one for all – or whatever that damn book says.”

She looks blankly at him. He sighs. “If we get out of this, I’m going to have to seriously expand your cultural horizons.”

Yael clears her throat. “Miss Teller, if you could come up here please?”

She climbs up gingerly, almost dislodged at the last moment by another thump from above them.

“The wiring, here – I am no expert – do you think you can work out where it goes? Perhaps you can disconnect the explosive, or change the timer?”

“What? Why me?”

Solo laughs from below them. “Gaby, you’re a mechanic – it’s the closest we’ve got to a bomb expert. If I can manufacture a grenade from tenth grade chemistry, you can do this.”

She stares at the mass of wiring and the control panel that Yael has uncovered. It all looks utterly alien to her.

_You chose this. You wanted this. So now, this is what you get. Dance faster. Drive harder. Get the job done._

Walter’s voice comes to mind. She’s twelve years old, angry and frustrated, trying to understand why the alternator on her little engine won’t work.

_It’s just logic, Süße. Start at the beginning of the problem, do what you can do, and the issue will become clear._

Slowly, she starts to piece together the connections, tapping them as she discounts the possibilities. She follows a section of wiring, half on instinct, knocking out ceiling panels as she goes. She follows it down the wall, knocking through the fragile plaster until the horrible ticking mess is revealed.

There’s no dial, no convenient countdown telling her how long she’s got. Each tick could be the last. The next thump is the nearest yet, rattling the medical instruments out of their trays. Fischer whimpers in the corner.

Dreamily, she surveys all the moving parts, linking together the knowns and reducing the unknowns until she finally selects a wire.

Solo’s voice cuts in to her reverie. “Gaby, are you sure?”

She smiles at him, shrugs slightly, then cuts the wire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gefangen = captured
> 
> Vega is NOT a relatively common Argentinian / South American surname, oops. Apologies to Ayelen Toscano. It's more Portuguese.
> 
> Another reminder that Solo should really be crediting Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins as well for the discovery of DNA. Franklin's contribution is all too often overlooked.
> 
> An author’s plea – I do not want to know if it's implausible that a) neither Solo nor Yael have bomb disposal training or b) Gaby’s mechanical engineering background translates to the situation they’re in. Cars have electric systems and the internal combustion engine is essentially a controlled explosion, so I figure she’s able to take a good stab at it. I know nothing about cars or bombs, so I’m asking you all to just go with it. Please and thank you!
> 
> For the Henry Cavill fans rightly wanting to defend his physique, the point about Solo being a touch out of shape compared to Illya is based on an interview I read – apparently the fact that Solo gets to keep his clothes on throughout the movie was a real bonus for Cavill as it meant there was less of a requirement to be in perfect physical condition. (Although I am ignoring the fact that while shooting in England, Armie Hammer apparently had to be banned from the local pub by Guy Ritchie because he was eating too many scotch eggs and putting on weight. Ahem.)


	10. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gaby finds out what Yael’s been hiding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So - if I was a different type of person, I'd delay posting this for a wee while, but I find cliffhangers incredibly frustrating and the ending is already written so....penultimate and final chapters posted at the same time! I hope it concludes satisfactorily!

**Geneva**

She stares down at Illya’s face.

“Do we know what they did to him yet?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“When will he wake up?”

“He should do shortly. The sedative they gave him was a known quantity, at least, and we’ve been keeping him under for a little longer ourselves, waiting for his vital signs to calm down.”

Solo asks the question they’ve both been thinking.

“Do you think Fischer succeeded?”

Waverly raises an eyebrow. “Are you asking me if we’ve tried cutting Illya open to see how quickly he heals?”

“Well, when you put it like that…”

“Solo, Miss Teller – we honestly have no idea. We don’t even know what we should be testing for. His bloodwork looks normal, as far as we can tell. I’ve got a group of scientists working on the research that Miss Dayan recovered now. The only issue is…”

Waverly pauses, choosing his words carefully.

“The issue is that we need to be especially careful from now on if we want to keep working in our little team. I’ve had to hand over a copy of Fischer’s research to the KGB, and I can’t promise that they won’t put two and two together.”

She’s horrified. “What were you thinking?”

“I was _thinking_ , Gaby, about diplomatic relations. The research has bought us some time. But if they test Illya and find out that he survived exposure to whatever it was Fischer was working on, then they may take him off active duty, keep him in Russia for testing.”

“But they’ll torture him – maybe even kill him! Fischer was half-crazy, his treatment probably hasn’t done anything.”

“Exactly. Which is why we are going to proceed with caution. I will delay KGB access to him as long as I can – there are at least lots of new leads to chase down from your expedition – but you should both be prepared. I do my best for my agents, particularly ones with as much value as the three of you, but I can’t promise we’ll be able to dance our way out of this one.”

“Then we’ll just have to dance faster, Waverly.”

It’s Solo who says it, echoing her thoughts so closely that it sends a shiver down her spine.

Waverly pauses on his way out the door. “Quite so, Solo, quite so.”

They sit together in companionable silence for a while, watching Illya’s unresponsive face.

“How sure _were_ you, in that lab?” Solo asks, finally.

“Pretty sure.”

“ _Pretty_ sure?”

She smiles at him, and enjoys the rare sight of Napoleon Solo looking discomfited.

“What did you tell Waverly about Fischer?”

“The truth.”

“Which is?”

He sighs. “Which is that he was badly injured and unable to move. That we interrogated him about his research and about Illya, he told us there was no way to reverse the treatment, that there were no other copies of his research, and then he died.”

“And then he died?”

“Well – he did.”

She opens her mouth to say – she forgets what she was going to say, because Illya’s head moves on the pillow.

“Peril! I just keep having to save your life, don’t I?”

“You’re – a terrible spy, Cowboy.” the Russian croaks, thickly.

Solo grins, squeezes Illya’s hand, and disappears out the door.

She hands him a glass of water and helps him drink it.

“You’re a bloody idiot, you know that, Kuryakin?”

He looks at her and smiles. “My knight – in shining armour.”

“You are clearly on a lot of pain medication.”

He slowly reaches a hand to her face. “малютка.”

She holds it there for a while, then he lies back and closes his eyes. She watches for the moment he falls asleep, probably the first person to do so since his mother, many years ago.

Waverly quietly knocks on the door.

“Miss Dayan is heading back to Tel Aviv now, if you’d like to say goodbye?”

She nods. She enters the hallway to find Napoleon trying one last charm offensive.

“It was a real pleasure, Miss Dayan. If you ever fancy tying me up again, do get in touch.”

It looks like Napoleon has finally managed to get under her skin because for a second, Yael’s face shows _exactly_ how annoying she finds him. She can be quite expressive when she wants to be.

Napoleon grins unrepentantly, kisses her hand flamboyantly and disappears out the front door.

Then it’s her turn.

“Gaby – have you come to say goodbye too?”

She nods. “And thank you. For – for the advice, and helping me get Illya out, and well – um…”

“Doing my job?” Yael smiles, saving her from the awkward goodbye. “It was a pleasure working with you too, Gaby. Waverly chooses his talent well. He has a valuable team here.”

The Israeli looks away for a moment, weighing something in the balance. She turns back, and it’s as if she’s dropped not just one mask, but all of them. It’s too much to read all at once, too many strong emotions jostling for control. There’s fear, desire, pain, loneliness, longing. It’s oddly familiar. Yael is looking at her with Illya’s eyes.

“Illya is a – a lucky man, Gaby. I hope he knows that. You are – very special.”

The Israeli leans in and kisses her cheek, lingering slightly, one hand brushing the softest of embraces down her arm.

Not for the first time with Yael, Gaby is rendered immobile by the surprise. She feels like a fool. No wonder Yael prefers to be seen as an automaton. And no wonder she makes an excellent spy – she’s been hiding herself from the world all her life.

She’d have thought Solo, with his own fluid sexuality, might have worked it out for himself, but he’s as susceptible as any man to underestimating a woman’s emotional complexity. Plus, he’s a narcissistic bastard sometimes and probably couldn’t conceive of a world where someone doesn’t find him attractive.

She turns to say something – “thank you”, “I’m sorry”, _anything_ – but Yael is already closing the door behind her. Gaby’s words catch in her throat and she considers chasing after her, but really, what can she say that won’t be woefully inadequate?

There’s a gentle cough behind her. She turns back towards Illya’s bedroom, where Waverly is standing quietly in the doorway, a wry smile on his face.

“Miss Teller, you do have a remarkable ability to soften the toughest of agents. Remind me to add that to your file.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ta-dah! Waverly gets the last word because, true to the film, he always does. And everyone loves Gaby as is right and proper, because she’s awesome.
> 
> On that note, I hope everyone’s satisfied with the ending. I know there were some red herrings earlier, but I think if you read Yael’s part all the way through, her motivations and reactions make sense.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who read and commented and gave kudos – this really was my first attempt at writing anything and I’m thrilled some people enjoyed it. And a particular thank you to everyone who commented with kind words about Yael. I wanted something to disrupt the team dynamic a bit and she just…happened. If I’ve avoided Mary Sue territory, then praise be. 
> 
> By the by, my personal head canon is that Illya is completely unchanged, but he’s such a tough cookie that it’s hard to tell if Fischer’s treatment had some effect or not. However, read it as you wish!


End file.
